alone with each other ...

Duh. Oh THAT Ron Moore.

2012-01-28T11:54:00.001-06:00

So, about half way through watching Battlestar Galactica for the very first time, I started to wonder about the people who created and wrote the series. I always do that. I'm a writer-follower, maybe even a writer-groupie.

I wanted to watch it in the first place because I try to watch everything that Jane Espenson writes. Sometimes it takes me a while to get to it, but I always want to get there. I knew she had joined the staff at BSG about half way through the series and I had heard her speak about working with Ron Moore. Naturally there came a point where I wondered, who is this Ron Moore guy?

So I googled him. And discovered that he was one of the principal writers for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I just finished re-watching. He was that Ron Moore. Oh, wasn't I the smart one to re-watch DS9 right before watching BSG? I patted myself on the back for that. No wonder some of the themes seemed so familiar!

I'm not sure I necessarily liked BSG better than DS9, although I liked both of them. The Star Trek Universe of DS9 created limitations on character development and story line. Star Fleet could not be evil. The Federation had to win. Life on Earth was utopian and the Federation wanted to bring that to other parts of the galaxy. But within that imposed structure, the writers pushed the envelope and created a very compelling story line with very compelling characters who I cared about. And by caring I don't mean "liking", although I liked many of them. I mean I cared what happened to them - whether they were good or bad I wanted to see what happened to them and I had certain hopes for what would happen to them. And it was exciting to see the writers manipulate that as they did. For instance, with the character of Damar who went from "dislikable" to "sympathetic but still not likable" to "heroic but not necessarily likable (although not dislikable)". I found myself mapping out all the possible outcomes for Damar and trying to decide which would be best for him and for Cardassia and the galaxy. And keep in mind that Damar was a minor recurring character through much of the series!

BSG didn't have those same limitations. The writers created a side we were obviously supposed to be rooting for - humans. And a side that was clearly the Big Bad - the Cylons. But then they seemed to throw any rules out the window. The humans were not limited by Federation style rules, they were human in the way that 21st century humans are human. We have ideals but we throw them out the window when necessity or fear dictates. Yes, these humans had all of our flaws. The humans turned out to be an incredibly complex set of people (as society actually is) with some deeply dislikable ones in their midst. Even the likeable humans were dislikable at certain moments. There was a point where I thought to myself "I hope none of these people actually reach Earth." I was fascinated by them as creations but I didn't really care about them, in the sense that I didn't really have hopes for any of them. The only one that I found myself hoping would survive was Helo - who was probably the most Star Trekian of all the characters, a deeply moral fellow. (By the way I finally see what people see in Tahmoh Penikett - who I thought was miscast in Dollhouse. He was pitch perfect as Helo.) Conversely, I didn't really hope that any of the dislikable ones would be killed off. I was regularly tired of the character of Doctor Baltar but I didn't care enough about him to hope whether he lived or died.

This is perhaps because the Cylons were, at first, so good as a Big Bad that they destroyed any real hope. Oh boy were they bad. In the opening of the show they destroy the population of nine planets with nuclear weapons, wiping out billions of people. Then they seem determined to chase the remaining humans (less than 50,000 souls) across the galaxy until they too are obliterated. And it seems likely they will succeed. The Cylons have weaponry more advanced than the humans. The Cylons can't die - their consciousness gets uploaded into a clone body. And, more frightening, they have evolved so that some of them seem completely human - twelve versions with multiple copies. Some programmed to think they are human until they are triggered. And some living among the remaining human population. What a very big and very bad, Big Bad.

By the end of the second season that was a problem. Because it offered no hope. There was no hope that the humans at any point would be able to turn and fight the Cylons and win their freedom. Winning by fighting wasn't an option. They could only hope for two very unlikely things - either the Cylons would grow tired of chasing them and finally leave them alone OR the Cylons would change. The first seemed unlikely and the second seemed impossible - the Cylons were machines after all.

Compare this to the Big Bad in DS9 who is also a very big and very bad Big Bad. But their foot soldiers weren't immortal and they had a weakness - a dependency upon a synthetic drug. The administrators were clones whose consciousness was downloaded into the next version when they died - but they were only administrators and did what they were told by the leaders. And the story line always left open the possibility that the leaders would change. And of course we knew that in the Star Trek Universe the Federation doesn't lose - something that we didn't know about the humans in the BSG Universe. (But of course Star Trek maintained tension because the Federation could win but all their allies could still lose). So even in the darkest moments, hope abounded.

In BSG they reached a point where, as an audience member, I started to wonder if we were just going to watch these people until the last one died. The writers dealt with the problem by using both options for change. They had the humans believe that they had outrun and hidden from the Cylons. Boy did that turn out to be wrong. You can't hide from the Cylons. And of course at the moment that the Cylons find them they had the complete wherewithal to wipe them out. End of story. So the only thing left if there was going to be any continuing story to tell was to have the Cylons change. In the end, the story of BSG turned out to really be the story of how the Cylons changed. On the one hand, that was an interesting twist. But on the other hand, for me it was a problem from the caring point of view because I deep down didn't really care what happened to the Cylons. Sure, if they changed maybe they should survive and live on. But they had destroyed billions of lives. And the fact was that, because the Cylons weren't a race of individuals and each Cylon had the memories of their last version downloaded into their consciousness, the Cylons we were dealing with by the third season were still essentially the same exact persons who had nuked nine planets - even though they had learned a lot since then. In our universe, people don't change THAT much, even if they do in a Sci Fi Universe. Since they never seemed at all remorseful about killing billions of people I found it hard to really care what happened to them.

Before watching I had heard that many fans deeply disliked the ending and complained about the religious aspects to the ending. I disliked that all the threads weren't tied up at the end. I really think we needed a bit more about Kara Thrace and the part about her dad and the music. But I'm not sure why the fans were surprised by the "religious" ending. The first two seasons were CRAMMED with religion. Maybe because I watched Caprica before I watched BSG the idea that religion was an important part of any story of the Cylons seemed natural to me. When the version of Caprica Six who existed in Doctor Baltar's head turned out not to be a chip implanted in his head and told him she was an angel from god - I always believed that she was intended to be an angel from god. That doesn't mean I believe in angels from god - it means that the only logical explanation in the storyline was that she was an angel from god and that a higher power was at work in that story line. So I went with it. And, in the end, having the two "angels" walking through Times Square worked for me.

DS9 made religion a large part of their story too, but because it was Star Trek and had to be based on "science" the writers created a scientific explanation for the Bajoran gods, or Prophets, that viewers could cling to. You could choose to think of them as the wormhole aliens we met in the pilot episode or you could choose to understand why the Bajorans worshipped them as gods OR you could understand why the science officer Jadzia Dax would always refer them as wormhole aliens and yet still choose visit the temple to thank them "just in case" after learning of some very good news.

On the whole I liked BSG. I liked the large and complex cast of characters. I liked that each version of a Cylon, while looking the same could be slightly different and I could begin to tell them apart. I liked that the writers set up situations where there really was no "right" answer - to insure safety meant sacrificing values. I liked that it was a show that seemed to be driven by exploring concepts rather than dead set on telling a coherent story and skimming over the big issues.

There were some things that I disliked. In the first season especially I was irritated by the fact that every female character who had sex turned out to be "bad" in some way - even if, in the case of Starbuck, it was simply letting her heart get in the way of her duty in passing Zach out of flight school. The "good" women were Dualla and the President and neither were sexual beings that first season. I also disliked the fact that Caprica Six was always taking her clothes off. Sure I can justify it by the plot and the characteristics of the Baltar character but in reality I was always pretty sure it was there to keep the men in the audience coming back. I was really glad when they finally had the scene where the nude Six in Baltar's head finally laughed at him and in the next instant was wearing a sweatsuit. I also disliked the Baltar character (which is different than disliking Baltar). In general I found it hard to believe that anyone actually took Baltar seriously -- ever, but especially in the first season. I thought that was a flaw in the writing and/or acting of the character. Although in the end it did make it more believable for me that a higher power had to be behind things, otherwise he would have been killed by someone in the first season out of sheer annoyance.

How would I choose between it and DS9? Well, first, I don't think I have to. They are what they are and I can enjoy both. I know I don't think DS9 is the lesser show because of the Star Trek constraints put on it. After all, Michelangelo was given a whole lot of constraints when told to paint the Sistine Chapel but that doesn't make it not a masterpiece. It simply makes it different than it would have been without constraints. In DS9 the writers were clearly finding their way in the first two seasons and then finally changed direction in the third season and the story took off. Parts of the ending weren't what I would have chosen but the ending made sense and there was a satisfied sense of closure (while still leaving things open for future movies). In BSG the writers seemed to have a very clear direction right out of the box and the first two seasons made a lot of sense. But perhaps sensing that they had written themselves into a box by making the Cylons so invincible, the story changed direction in the third season. For a time it became more exciting but it didn't seem, in the end, that they knew where they were going with it and I didn't feel a deep sense of closure.

MLK’s Birthday

2012-01-15T20:33:00.001-06:00

In honor of MLK’s birthday, this year I’m choosing to remember him in his fist victory rather than in death. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December, 1955. The boycott went on for eleven long months. Martin Luther King Jr. was a young man and a leader of the movement. On November 13, 1956 the United States Supreme Court declared segregation on buses unconstitutional. A unanimous ruling.

Here a very young Martin Luther King Jr. announces to the crowd that they will begin riding buses again:

DS9–Kira and Dukat

2012-01-11T20:41:00.001-06:00

Hellooooooooo. Anybody there?

Yes, it has been a while since I’ve been here. Life has been … busy. To say the least. But in the midst of all that busyness I watched all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’d seen it before but after watching Enterprise I wanted to watch it again to see if it was as good as I recalled. It was. Oh, it was.

It’s a wonderfully written series and the entire ensemble cast is terrific. And there is a plethora of recurring characters, all as well developed as the regularly appearing characters.

But, even the second time around, I still found myself wishing the writers had let Kira be the character who conquered Gul Dukat instead of Sisko. But this time through I found myself suspecting that women writers would have allowed that to happen and maybe part of the problem was the dearth of women writers on the series.

The relationship between Kira and Dukat through 5 1/2 seasons was one of the best television relationships ever between a series character and a recurring character. In many ways it was even better than the relationship between Captain Picard and Q (wonderful though that was).

Gul Dukat is probably the best villain in Star Trek history because he is such a complex villain. The writers understood that Bad People don’t think they are bad. Dick Cheney didn’t wake up every day and think “Ah, I’m so evil.” No, Bad People usually think they are good. And in certain parts of their lives they may, in fact, be not that bad.

The joy of having a recurring character is that the writers can have the character make wide character arc swings. If the writers did that with regular characters, from week to week, the audience wouldn’t buy it. The audience needs to believe that they know the regular characters, so character changes have to be incremental. But recurring characters are those people you don’t know all that well, who always surprise you.

As Gul Dukat appeared in occasional episodes he was charming and grating and generous and evil. The swings didn’t jar because we were always trying to figure out who he really was. Kira knew he was evil and couldn’t be trusted but we, the audience, hadn’t lived through the Bajoran occupation and so we weren’t so sure.

And then the writers did a very clever thing. They sent Dukat and Kira on a mission together and they had Kira let her guard down a little. And, yes, there was something between them. Some connection.

Don’t get me wrong, I was never one of those people who wanted the writers to have Dukat find redemption and end up with Kira. Dukat was not Spike from Buffy – if he saved the world it would only happen because it was good for him. But I liked that they made the relationship between the two of them more complex. Because let’s face it, sometimes people we dislike are also very attractive. And we can find ourselves sucked into their orbit only to later kick ourselves for letting our guard down.

And that’s what seemed to happen at the beginning of Season 6. The Cardassians had captured the Space Station, Gul Dukat was occupying Captain Sisko’s office and Kira was forced to play her part and try to get along with him. He had the upper hand; he had all the power. He could bait her and she could not fight back.

It was a perfect scene of the kind of subtle sexual harassment that often happens in an office environment. The person in power knows they can make insinuations that just brush against the bounds of decency but they have plausible deniability and the person without power must just stand there and take it. It was a great scene and so well played by Nana Visitor and Marc Alaimo.

Ah, I thought. This is really going to make their relationship interesting. He’ll just keep pushing and pushing but one day, she’ll get him. And he’ll be sorry.

But no. Instead they shifted Dukat’s story away from Kira and over to Sisko. Oh, they had an episode where Kira had to find out that Dukat had a relationship with her mother (the revelation of which seemed to come out of nowhere) and there was the episode where Kira had to watch as Dukat tried to be a messianic cult figure – but those episodes seemed to lack something. They weren’t really about the relationship between the two characters, they were about other things.

Instead the writers tried to make the key antagonistic relationship be between Sisko and Dukat. I never really bought that because for 6 years Sisko mostly treated Dukat as a minor annoyance.

This time through I found myself wondering if the male writers found themselves in a situation where they had created great tension (sexual and otherwise) between Kira and Dukat but they just couldn’t imagine a scenario where that tension didn’t resolve itself without a hookup of the two characters. I’d like to think that women writers would have seen the potential in the harassment aspects of the story and run with it. Kira was such a strong character. In the end she could have taken Dukat down.

And that would have been so satisfying.

But despite my disappointment with the end of that particular story arc, I still love the series. I’m finding myself thinking about all of the other story arcs and wishing that Hollywood had seen fit to make follow up movies of DS9.

Podcasts

2011-11-19T11:55:00.001-06:00

I go through phases where I listen to lots of podcasts followed by periods where I lose interest and listen to very few. This pattern has been exacerbated by the fact that my iTunes has crashed at least three times in the last year and every time it crashes it loses my entire list of podcasts that I subscribe to. So then I have to start over and end up deciding to not re-subscribe to ones that I’ve lost interest in and looking for new ones.

About three months ago I went through that process again and I find that I really like my current list of podcasts. My mom asked me to explain how she can find NPR podcasts and listen to them. And AndiF recommended some of her favorite podcasts in comments to my last post. So it seems like a good time to talk podcasts.

My very favorite podcast, one that I listened to consistently for a couple of years, is the Slate Audio Book Club. It is exactly what it says it is, a group of people sitting around talking about a book they read. There are usually three people and they are usually Slate editors or contributors but sometimes there is a guest. It is usually on only once a month and sometimes they take off the summers. It is exactly the kind of reading discussion group that I’ve always wanted to be in. They spend an hour talking about the book in an organized way with one of them taking the role of leader. I admit I’m not particularly wild about the people who have been in the group the last few months because they tend (and I KNOW this is prejudice on my part) to have heavy East Coast accents and they interrupt each other a lot. But even though I find their voices grating, I still love to listen to it. And I find it very annoying that I can’t find a single other podcast that uses the exact same format. Most podcasts that call themselves “bookclubs” are really author interviews.

The podcast that I’ve recently become hooked on is the Nerdist Writers Panel which is, again, exactly what it sounds like. A podcast panel of writers of television programs (and sometimes movies) that nerds like. You know, shows like Buffy, Terriers, Star Trek, etc. Actually, I lie. It also features writers from lots of shows that are loved by the general public. It is a long podcast, usually at least an hour and sometimes an hour and a half, so it is good for listening to on the treadmill. It is taped in front of a live audience (who all seem to be aspiring television writers) so there is a period for audience questions. I think the podcast is at its best when the moderator encourages the panel to interact with each other and question each other but even when they are just answering his questions it is still a fascinating glimpse into the writers rooms.

Another long time favorite podcast is the Firewall and Iceberg Podcast which is a one hour weekly podcast featuring television critics Alan Sepinwall and Dan Fienberg, both of whom now write for Hitfix.com. I don’t know how I found this podcast, but I found it before Alan Sepinwall moved to Hitfix so it was a while ago. Half the time I haven’t watched the shows they talk about but it doesn’t seem to matter to me. I like their discussion because it’s a real back and forth where they don’t always agree with each other but they clearly respect each other. And they are funny (although not as funny as they sometimes think they are). It sort of reminds me of the kind of radio shows that would have been on college radio stations back in the day but without the call-in feature. It also sort of reminds me of an updated version of Siskel and Ebert, but without any “clips” to hear. Again, it is usually at least an hour so it’s good to listen to while on the treadmill.

A similar podcast is the Talking TV Podcast with critics Maureen Ryan and Ryan McGee. I don’t listen to this one all the time, even though I really like to read Maureen Ryan. The podcast sometimes bores me, probably because the two critics don’t seem to disagree strongly with each other enough. But I do listen to it occasionally.

Over the years I’ve subscribed to lots of different book related podcasts. The one I always come back to is the Guardian Books Podcast which is moderated by Claire Armitage. She usually has guests which often include authors. They talk about new books and old books and other literary news. It’s usually on once a week which is quite manageable.

Lately I’ve been listening to The Book Show, which is an Australian radio show. I find the down under point of view interesting but I sometimes get bored when they are talking about books that don’t seem to be available here. It is also a daily podcast which should be a good thing because there is always one available for listening. For some reason, though, I find the list of un-listened-to podcasts very stressful. I’m on the fence about continuing to listen to it but every time I think I will unsubscribe, up pops a really good episode.

I’ve recently been listening to BBC4’s Books and Authors Podcast which features half hour shows that run on BBC4 about books and authors. My favorite of the shows is “A Good Read” where the moderator and her two guests each recommend one book and they all discuss the three recommended books. They must, of course, coordinate in advance, so that they’ve all three read all three books by the time the discussion takes place. One thing I like is that the guests aren’t afraid to say that they didn’t really care for a book that was selected by one of the other guests. It’s the closest thing I can find to Slate’s Audio Book Club but they talk about three books in a 1/2 hour so it moves too fast to really be the same thing.

I’ve also recently become hooked on BBC4’s Front Row podcast which sometimes features discussion about books but more often is a discussion of theater and sometimes movies. I started listening to it a few months ago and now find myself really wanting to go to London for a week of theater.

At this point I’m not really overtly looking for any new podcasts but of course I’m always open to good ones.

Streaming a River of Old TV

2011-11-01T18:58:00.001-05:00

Via Alyssa Rosenberg I read a Tim Carmody article about how Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming both are offering full seasons of old television series.

Seriously: Blockbuster movies make for great one-off meals, but the back catalog is the video streamer’s comfort food. Viewers love snacking on old favorites when there’s nothing better on and binging on shows or seasons they missed during their first run.
It’s one of the few things that is an order of magnitude easier on a digital service like Netflix than actually popping in a DVD or managing a folder full of torrented movie files: The service perfectly maintains your place in the series, no matter what device you’re using, and you can just hit “play next episode” over and over again. Or you can easily scan for a rewatchable favorite. (Readers with kids know this is particularly useful.)

I concur. In fact, I find myself almost unable to watch television on DVD anymore if it is available on streaming Netflix. In June a friend of mine lent me the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise, because it was the one Star Trek series I had never seen. Between July and the end of September I had watched about 1/2 of that first season. Then I discovered it was also on streaming Netflix. I’m now into the third season. In just one month.

With a series on DVD I have to be in the room with the DVD player and every 40 minutes I need to switch to the next episode. With streaming Netflix I can carry it around on my iPad and watch while I’m in the kitchen or doing laundry or cleaning a room that is not the room with the DVD in it. And at the end of one episode I just press the button for the next. Let’s face it – I’ve gotten lazy. Streaming Netflix is just too easy.

The real downside with watching on my iPad is that I find myself doing that instead of reading at night. My reading has fallen off the cliff. Partly I just haven’t found any books that I’m dying to read but partly it’s that I’m really caught up in watching old television.

11 in 11

2011-10-29T13:03:00.001-05:00

I spent last night at the 7th game of the World Series watching the Cardinals win. It was a totally different experience from the 2006 Series game that I went to even though both were games where the Series was won by the Cardinals.

In 2006, I knew that they hadn’t had a great season and it was a shock that they got to the Series and I was on pins and needles the entire time. Everyone in the crowd around me was the same. This time, they had a terrible season up until the end and it was a shock that they got to the Series but I was just so happy they were in it that I didn’t even really care if they won. And many of the people around me weren’t even paying attention to the game, they were too busy taking pictures to show that they were there.

There was a large group of people who didn’t get tickets to the game who brought lawn chairs and watched through the left field gates. As the game went on the crowd out there grew until there seemed to be thousands of people. The benefit (perhaps the sole benefit) of big empty lot next to the stadium, where the old stadium used to be, is that it can hold thousands of partying people. And they did party. The streets were packed when the game was over. Everyone was so happy. Strangers were high fiving each other.

The parade is Sunday and that should be a lot of fun.

And then the hot stove league starts and we find out of Albert is staying or leaving us.

International Dorothy Dunnett Day

2011-10-15T12:48:00.001-05:00

Today is the first International Dorothy Dunnett Day, meant to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of her first novel, The Game of Kings. At 1:00 p.m. local time all fans are to gather and toast the author. If there is a gathering here in St. Louis, I don’t know about it so I will be toasting her by myself.

I was standing in line at the grocery store a few weeks ago, gazing without seeing at the magazines in the rack, when the latest Time Magazine came into focus. On the front was an article called “Why Mom Liked You Best” and a picture of three little kids with plates in front of them holding slices of cake. One of them had a much bigger slice of cake.

I thumbed through the magazine and realized that the theme really tied in with some thinking I had been doing lately about Dunnett’s epic series of novels, The Lymond Chronicles . In the article it said that in any given family most children are perfectly knowledgeable about which child is the favorite, even if the parents try their hardest not to play favorites. I had been recently thinking about how Dunnett had used that very fact to lay a foundation for a surprising twist in her story. A twist that might have worked better if it had been able to be structured a little differently.

I had been thinking about Dunnett in connection with last season’s Doctor Who, which I thought was too rushed from an emotional point of view. To set up a really satisfying ending you have to set up the characters emotionally and you have to give the reader enough facts along the way that the ending doesn’t require too much exposition of new facts. I applaud Moffatt for trying what he tried this season but I didn’t think it quite worked. But creative people have to try things and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. And I was thinking that even Dorothy Dunnett, who was brilliant in bringing her plots together, sometimes had to rush things a bit.

There are many reasons why I like the writing of Dorothy Dunnett, but one of them is that I love how she structures her stories over many thousands of pages to bring the reader to moments that are both surprising and satisfying not only intellectually but emotionally.

It isn’t solely that she peppers her story with facts that are necessary for the final twist to make sense, it is that she lays the emotional foundations that are necessary for a reader to be fully invested in the the answer to the question she is raising and that makes the reader really appreciate the surprising twists in the story rather than feeling cheated by them.

Dunnett was a master at setting up endings. But even she wasn’t perfect. She had one plot line which didn’t quite come together as well as it might have and, in my opinion, felt too rushed at the end.

At the end of her six novels called The Lymond Chronicles Dunnett resolves a number of plot lines that she has been working on for thousands of pages. The most obvious resolution is to the question of whether Lymond is going to live or whether she will kill him off. The ending works because it has been firmly established through six long novels that she is ruthless in pursuit of her tale and never hesitates to kill off a character if the tale requires the death to occur. And, it turns out, that over six long novels she has laid every factual and emotional foundation necessary for her to structure the resolution to that question without having to introduce any extraneous explanations after the fact, so that the story can unfold before us and the emotions can wash over us.

spoilers ahead (although only limited spoilers)

The other big question to be resolved by the end of the tale is the question of Sybilla Crawford’s past life – what she did and why she did it and why she worked so hard to keep it a secret. This resolution does not work quite as well, at least not for me. It seems a little rushed and it needs a significant amount of exposition right at the end to get the reader to what should be the emotional “aaah” moment.

The problem is that Dunnett has laid the emotional foundations for the resolution brilliantly but for very practical structural reasons she can’t lay the entire factual foundation in advance. So there comes a moment at the end of the novel when Sybilla must simply tell her story. The reader is given a whole lot of important facts to digest about Sybilla’s past life and long dead people. A whole lot of complicated important facts to digest, and they all must be digested at a time when the reader is emotionally drained by what came before.

The thing that we the reader have known and understood from the very beginning of the tale is that Sybilla has two sons, Richard and Francis, and she loves both of them but she loves the younger son, Francis, more. Dunnett doesn’t try to turn that concept on its head at the end. There is no doubt that the bond between Sybilla and Francis is key to understanding most of the story.

But it is so easy, throughout the story, to sympathize with Richard’s frustration over this. Most of the time Richard simply accepts the situation. He knows his mother loves him. He tries not to hold it against his brother that she loves Francis more. But occasionally Richard’s frustrations get the best of him, especially when it seems that Francis is just not worthy of that extra love. Especially when Richard has been the reliable, dutiful son who has been there for his mother while Francis is gallivanting all over the world.

There is no doubt in Richard’s mind or in the mind of the readers that, for Sybilla, Francis and his welfare would always come first. Francis himself perhaps even assumes this for a very long time. After all, as the Time Magazine article suggested, siblings are well aware of their own hierarchy.

So what a nice little “ahh” moment it is when we discover that the big secret that Sybilla has been keeping for so long, at such great emotional cost to herself and to her favorite son Francis, is a secret that she is keeping for Richard’s sake. In this matter, Richard came first for her.

And the beauty of Dunnett’s plotting is that Richard will never, ever know this and will go on thinking, for the remainder of his life, that he always comes second.

It is such a nice little moment and it is unfortunate that it is almost buried at the end of the novel.

I’ve always felt that Dunnett was brilliant in laying the factual and emotional foundation for the hugely emotional penultimate chapter of The Lymond Chronicles. By that moment in the novels she has set up the story of Francis Crawford of Lymond in such a way that she has three very real choices: she can kill him; she can let him live with an unsatisfying life laying ahead of him or she can let him live with a happy ending. And it is a tribute to her that letting him live with a happy ending, while desirable, is incredibly unlikely because of the almost insolvable problems that she has set up in the psyche of her characters.

At the moment in which we find out whether he lives or dies, we are in the midst of a Shakespearean tragedy where death is the result of hubris. Lymond himself has driven Austin Gray to the point of insanity and we, the readers, have a complete understanding of why Austin feels driven to take the actions he takes. We, the readers, have been led to this emotional point very carefully through more than 5,000 pages and all of the factual points necessary to make the situation work have all been clearly established earlier in the novels. It all comes together in one moment of brilliant plotting.

Because of the huge emotional drain of that penultimate chapter I’ve always read the ultimate chapter as if it was an epilogue. It has the rushed feeling of an epilogue. And although Dunnett has laid the emotional foundation for the final reveal about Richard and Sybilla, the factual foundation is not complete. There are too many important facts that need to be introduced and the only way for her to do that quickly is through exposition. Thus, the emotionally drained reader is still trying to take in the import of exactly what happened to Sybilla when the reader should be reacting to the disclosure that Richard, who has always come second in the minds of everyone, was first in the mind of Sybilla in this one very important situation. And he will never know it.

But since these are the types of novels that one thinks about long after one has finished reading, eventually we can bring our focus on that moment and realize how Dunnett and Sybilla fooled us for all those pages into thinking that Sybilla would never put Richard first. And realizing what a brilliant plot resolution that is.

It has occurred to me that Dunnett perhaps knew that this moment got lost at the end of The Lymond Chronicles and wanted to further explore this idea. When she moved on to her series of novels that became The House of Niccolo she intentionally made her main character someone whose youth was significantly flawed as the result of a situation similar to the situation Richard might have found himself in at the age of ten. The facts are very different, but the end result might have been the same if Sybilla hadn’t decided to keep her secret for Richard’s sake.

In the end, this rushed ending doesn’t result in a significant flaw in the novels. They are still brilliantly realized and she manages to tie up all the big threads and leave enough little threads hanging that readers are still discussing them. But a part of me always wishes there had been a little more time to lead us to that ultimate ending rather than tacking it into an epilogue-like chapter.

But certainly all of you should read the novels yourself and judge for yourself.

So on this, the first International Dorothy Dunnett Day, I raise a toast to Dorothy Dunnett. Writers like her don’t come along very often.

Withdrawal

2011-10-11T22:28:00.001-05:00

via Discoblog, a fan made 50th anniversary video that I think manages to get all the doctors in except the 6th and most of the major villains.

When I Discovered Colin Firth

2011-10-07T19:13:00.001-05:00

I’ve always felt somewhat good about the fact that I was a Colin Firth fan before he became well known in America. I was a Colin Firth fan even before he starred in what is, for me, the definitive film version of Pride and Prejudice. I became a Colin Firth fan way back in the 1987 when the PBS Masterpiece Theater series aired Lost Empires.

I remember watching Alistair Cooke introduce each episode and explaining that if the novel/film had been set in America it might have been called “Lost Palaces” because this was a story of vaudeville in Britain and every small town had an Empire Theatre, just like every town in America had a Palace Theater. But of course it was also a play on words because it was a film looking back on the days when the British Empire was not yet in decline – pre World War I.

Firth played Richard Herncastle, a young man who loses his parents and is left with only one living relative, his uncle Nick who is a very successful vaudeville magician. Richard joins the act and travels the music hall circuit. Lawrence Olivier was in the film, playing a sad, washed up comedian.

I’ve always been fascinated with “back stage” stories that show the good and bad about theater life. Richard isn’t interested in a vaudeville career, he wants to be an artist. But he meets a lot of interesting people.

Lost Empires is being released on DVD. I’d like to see it again. Maybe someone will give it to me for Christmas …

Doctor Who Season 6 Finale

2011-10-02T21:36:00.001-05:00

First. I love Doctor Who and an average season (or even a bad season)of Doctor Who is better than most of what else is on television.

Second, I’ve never really liked any of the season finales for New Who except last season’s “Big Bang”. In the Russell T. Davies era the stories were so over the top that my eyes got tired of rolling. I particularly disliked the season finale where they had to tow the Earth back to the solar system.

Third, I constantly remind myself that this is a show that is essentially meant to be a silly show for the family to watch. I think of Doctor Who the way I think of those old fashioned Disney movies starring Fred MacMurray. I don’t usually expect deep character development; I understand that there are going to be many stereotypes and some of the characters will verge on cartoonish.

So, keeping all of that in mind, I thought the finale was fine but not great. It was a visual treat and it tied up lots of loose ends. It’s one of those episodes that, on the one hand, you can’t think about too much or it just doesn’t make sense. On the other hand it is the kind of episode that you will think about a lot and eventually figure out twists that you missed the first time. Just like the rest of the season it had a lot of potential and just like the rest of the season it did not, for me, hit the high mark that the fifth season hit.

But I give them credit for trying.

I think Steven Moffat is one of the most creative writers in television today. I applaud what he experimented with this season. Doctor Who has done story arcs in other seasons of New Who but not to the extent that was tried this season. There is a big difference between putting the words “Bad Wolf” in every episode or putting a glimpse of the crack in the universe in every episode and what was tried this season – a character driven story arc.

In my opinion it didn’t quite work, but that’s ok as long as they learn from it. Maybe a thirteen episode season in which the audience expects (and likes) many stand alone episodes was just too short for the kind of story that Moffat was trying to tell. It felt rushed. The emotions felt undeveloped. It didn’t hang together at times. If this was an American series with 23 episodes it might have worked. Maybe.

But although the execution was a bit flawed I do think he achieved what he set out to achieve. He has deconstructed the Doctor and moved the Doctor back into a position where he can act more like a traditional Doctor who isn’t seen as a superhero and isn’t known in every corner of the Galaxy. As far as character development of the Doctor went, I think this season was very successful. I look forward to what Moffat tries to do with the Doctor next season.

I also think Moffat was fairly successful with the character of Rory. Not perfect, but very good. At one point I said I had a theory that this season was “all about Rory” as opposed to last season that was all about Amy. Well, that didn’t end up being completely true, it was really all about the Doctor. But Rory definitely shone in the spotlight.

The Companion is always a lens through which we, the viewer, see the Doctor and this year we saw the Doctor very much through Rory’s eyes. Rory was not enamored of the Doctor and saw the Doctor as dangerous. That worked very well for Moffat’s plan. And I sort of liked that we did, for once, see the Doctor more often through the male companion’s eyes rather than the female companion’s eyes. To think that only the female companion can be the eyes of the viewer is really somewhat sexist.

But the weakest part of this season was, undoubtedly, the female characters – both River and Amy. At this point I feel like a broken record in my complaints about Amy so I’m not even going to go into it again other than to say that, while Amy’s speech to Madame Kovarian was a nice moment, it didn’t make up for the lack of emotion she showed over the entire season about what happened to Melody/River or, for that matter, what happened to her in being kidnapped and her body used to carry a child that was immediately taken from her.

On the other hand, I will complain about what was done with the character of River Song in the second part of this season. River Song went from being a strong female character who we assumed had a career as an archaeologist separate and apart from her interest in the Doctor to being a woman who is completely and totally obsessed with a man. We find that she became an archaeologist solely for the purpose of tracking the Doctor. She is willing to destroy the whole Universe because she cannot bear the thought that she is the one to kill the Doctor. She goes to prison for killing the Doctor when he and she know darn well that he is not dead. In the Library River gave up her life for the Doctor and it seemed noble. But in this episode she gives up her freedom for the Doctor and it just seems like she’s being the dumb woman who will do anything for her man. I almost expected Tammy Wynette to start playing after the scene in Utah.

But while all of that was disappointing, it was the way the Doctor treated her in this last episode that really struck me. The moment when the Doctor tells her that he’s going to marry her (after telling her that he doesn’t want to marry her and that she embarrasses him) and she needs to just do as she’s told has got to be the low point in the character development of River Song. That was the moment that I realized that Moffat had destroyed River as the unique female character that she was when the Doctor met her in the Library. She has now become just like all the other Doctor Who women – there to serve the Doctor.

What a disappointment.

As I said, I think Steven Moffat is one of the best writers in television. But even the best writers sometimes get it wrong. And when it came to the women of Doctor Who this season, he really got it wrong.

Sherlock Tracks The Doctor: A Study in Time

2011-09-30T21:26:00.001-05:00

Watch this GREAT mashup of Sherlock and Doctor Who:

via Live for Films

Can’t wait for January and new Sherlock on PBS.

Complex – Many Different and Connected Parts.

2011-09-18T13:12:00.001-05:00

After Let’s Kill Hitler I decided not to blog every week about Doctor Who. It is, after all, a show aimed at kids (although not only at kids) so analyzing it too much takes the fun out of it, in my opinion.

But as we go into the home stretch on this season I find that I want to go on record about a few things. With two more episodes to go, I don’t have any compulsion to make a definitive judgment about the season yet. That would be like judging a 1300 page novel after finishing 1100 pages. So I fully intend to wait to see how Steven Moffat winds up the story arc before judging it.

I just want to record my own temperature at this point to see where I am now versus where I was a few weeks ago.

I complained about direction in previous posts. The last two episodes (The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex) were both beautifully directed by Nick Hurran who seemed to get that little extra something out of his actors that has sometimes been lacking this season. Or at least he managed to capture their very good acting and see that it showed up on the edited final product. I really felt involved with each character and understood what each character was thinking. I really hope they use him again.
The stories for the last two episodes have been very good. The Girl who Waited was written by Tom MacRae. His previous effort was a two part story for the Tenth Doctor and although I know that critics didn’t really like The Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel I remember liking them very much. The God Complex was written by Toby Whithouse who also wrote one of my favorite episodes for the Tenth Doctor – School Reunion which saw the return of Sarah Jane Smith. (His other episode was Vampires of Venice which, while not a favorite, I did enjoy.) When Moffat decides to leave Who they might want to consider Whithouse as the next head writer.
I enjoyed Night Terrors enough but thought it was weird to have a story about a terrified little boy and never have Amy or Rory mention their own daughter (although it was also weird that Old Amy in The Girl Who Waited never mentioned that failure of the Doctor either). Then I read that Night Terrors was originally intended for the first half of the season and was switched with The Curse of the Black Spot. That’s a shame. It would have made much more sense in the first half and The Curse of the Black Spot, with its very fallible Doctor constantly guessing wrong and the alien medic who harmed through kindness, would have fit much better in the second half. I hope there was a production reason why it had to be switched and not simply a realization that they needed the Pirates to already exist before A Good Man Goes to War for that brief second where they stop Madame Kovarian from getting on her spaceship.
Unfortunately, despite the ending of The God Complex I don’t for a moment believe that we’ve seen the end of the Pond-Williams duo (and it really annoyed me that the Doctor tried to change her name to Williams at the end). At a minimum, if the action goes back to Utah and the death of the Doctor, which is where the season began, they have to be there because, well, they were there. But I really really hope that this is the end of them as regular Companions. I feel very much about Amy Pond as I felt about Rose Tyler – in fact I’ve gone through almost the exact same arc. I really liked both characters a lot at the beginning and thought the story arc that brought each character to the end of her first season was brilliant. By the middle of each character’s second season I disliked what had been done to each of the characters and by the end I was more than ready for both to go. It isn’t necessary to suck Amy into an alternate universe since there isn’t any silly love story that can’t go anywhere. But she needs to leave the TARDIS permanently and the Doctor needs to move on. I wouldn’t mind seeing River visit them occasionally.
After this story arc is finished, I’d like to see the Doctor begin to travel more to other planets that are not either places made to fool people into thinking they are on Earth or terra-formed planets filled with earthlings who have migrated at some point in the future. I miss alien planets like we used to get in the old Classic Who. There hasn’t been enough of that in New Who. Maybe being in an alien culture could mean that the companion could act more independently and help those people from other planets who will (inevitably) be in distress. I’m really getting tired of the companion as “Damsel in Distress saved by the Doctor” meme, both of which were present in the last three episodes.
I previously complained about the lack of emotion this season. The Girl Who Waited made up for that in spades. Lots of emotion and handled almost flawlessly (except for the failure to mention Melody being stolen). Lots of emotion in The God Complex too, although I find it hard to believe that Amy could give up her faith in the Doctor just like that when he told her to. I would have liked to have seen a gradual failure in faith through this entire season with this episode being the final straw that finally puts him in perspective for her. I liked Whithouse’s story but he was called upon to find a way to get that entire complicated concept into one episode. They spent 13 episodes in the first season building Amy’s faith and not nearly enough time in the second season destroying it. Truthfully, a part of me really wished it had been Old Amy who had survived in The Girl Who Waited. Or at least that more was made of Young Amy realizing that Old Amy kind of had a point about the Doctor – that would have made The God Complex episode a bit more believable.
And that leads me to the whole concept of pacing. I’ve felt from the beginning of the Moffat seasons that part of his plan was to deconstruct the Davies years and take the Doctor back to a place that is closer to the Doctors of old: A brilliant, arrogant alien who travels through time and space observing the wonders of the universe but, while he fights bad guys along the way, someone who is still a fairly irresponsible being. The Eccleston/Tennant years saw the Doctor evolve from a war damaged alien who still basically thought the way the old Doctors thought, to a godlike being who was responsible for all of humankind. The Lonely God was very effective, although a bit exhausting.

But it leaves you nowhere to go with the character except to start bringing him down a few pegs. Davies destroyed all the other Time Lords so the journey down can’t be inflicted on him, it has to be a slow realization of his own. (I admit that I wondered if Moffat would bring back the Time Lords since Time Lord atoms were in the TARDIS when Big Bang 2 occurred.) So Moffat is slowly breaking the Doctor down with a long slow process where he realizes how he is thought of and what effect he can have on people – completely unbalanced of course the way people in a depression are unbalanced. All the emphasis is on the “dark” Doctor and not remembering all the years of the good, heroic Doctor. But while the set up for the descent has been long and slow, I fear that the descent is going to be brief and fast and over too soon. It took Davies and Eccleston/Tennant five years and a whole lot of emotion over all of those five years to bring the Tenth Doctor to the point where we believed that he was, or at least thought he was, The Lonely God. To have the emotional part of his descent back to ordinary Time Lord crammed into a few episodes at the end of this season seems way too fast.
Finally, even though I have so many good things to say about The God Complex I still find myself relatively cold on the season. In general, I find myself less satisfied at this point in the season than I have with any other season. Although it probably doesn’t help that I’m watching this season in real time and not straight through as I did for the other seasons.

And so we’re off to the end of the season. Throughout this past year Moffat has seeded his stories with allusion upon allusion to past episodes in the Doctor’s life. It has been clever and fun. It remains to be seen how many of those allusions are clues to what is going to happen and which (the vast majority) are just red herrings and there for fun.

But at least the Cybermen will be back next week.

No Movie in my Mind

2011-09-12T21:13:00.001-05:00

A brief thought. A month or so ago I was in a discussion with some friends and family about books and about what we see in our mind’s eye when we read novels. I admitted that I don’t see the the story as a movie in my mind. I know that others do. I wonder how common it is not to have much of a visual picture of the story.

I long ago knew that I wasn’t very good at imagining the geography of interior spaces described in stories. Back in grade school there were tests we took in which we read descriptions of interior spaces and then had to sketch floor plans. Surprisingly, mine were usually wrong.

I say surprisingly because reading comprehension was always my highest score on most tests. But comprehending substance and imagining space seem to be two different talents.

In my mind, the setting of stories are somewhat like old movie studio back lots and generic sets. Just enough to suggest that we are in a woods or on main street or in the drawing room of a mansion. Not the detail that today’s high definition productions require. I don’t put any imagination into creating the settings.

I’ve been wondering if that is one reason why I’ve never read much science fiction. It is a great effort for me to create the settings in my mind if they don’t fit into some generic classification.

9/11 Fiction

2011-09-10T12:40:00.001-05:00

Commentary Magazine put together a list of 30 novels “with the 9/11 attacks at their backs”. That got me thinking about what I had read and realizing I’ve not read many of them.

I wasn’t particularly interested in reading novels about September 11 in the first few years after the attacks. After watching hours of television of the attacks that week, I didn’t feel that I needed fiction to make sense of it. And over the past 10 years, the 9/11 novels I have read have been accidental readings where I didn’t know 9/11 was going to be a big part of the novel.

I did read Claire Messud’s novel, The Emperor’s Children.

The best novel to emerge from September 11, and perhaps the only real 9/11 novel on the list. A New York intellectual is caught in a lie and stranded in his adulterous lover’s apartment by the attacks, which change nothing for him and everything for her.

What’s strange is that, until I read this article I would never have remembered The Emperor’s Children as a 9/11 novel. I remember it as a typical novel about people who are not from New York but want to be intellectual so they move to New York and meet intellectual, people. And are still not happy. But now that I remember that it did involve 9/11, I remember that the most interesting 9/11 part was the character who used 9/11 to escape from New York and start a new life in Florida. Cruel to his family perhaps, but interesting. On the whole I didn’t find the novel added anything to my understanding of 9/11 or evoked any particular emotion from me.

I also read Joseph O’Neill’s, Netherland and it left me cold.

A family of three — Dutch-born market analyst, British wife, two-year-old son — are living in a Tribeca loft when the World Trade Center attacks oblige them to find living quarters uptown, where their marriage gradually pulls apart.

The most interesting part of that novel, for me, was the community of cricket players from former British Empire countries. But I was tired of the morose feel of the novel, especially because the main character could always escape New York in the months after 9/11 by going back to Europe. So why didn’t he? I found it a chore to read.

I did generally enjoy Ian McEwan’s, Saturday but that might be because it was a reflection of Europe after 9/11, not America.

A London neurosurgeon begins his day by watching a plane on fire — a bomb on board, he assumes — and navigates around an anti-Iraq War protest to encounter terrorism in his own home.

I still vividly remember the main character in his car trying to avoid the traffic jams from the anti-Iraq War protest. And I remember the home invasion. I remember thinking the ending required too much suspending of disbelief, but on the whole I liked it.

The only other book on the list that I’ve read is Jonathan Safran Foer’s, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I loved it.

A nine year old searches all over New York for the key to his father, who died on September 11.

I remember thinking that Foer had captured something special in that novel: how grief over a death that happens from violence like 9/11 is unique but also completely ordinary. I loved the moment when Oskar blurts out that he wishes it had been his mother who had died and not his father. That moment was so hurtfully real. And it didn’t matter why his father had died. I loved how Foer intertwined into the novel the story of the bombing of Dresden and the nuclear bombing of Japan to show that no matter how bad 9/11 was, worse things have happened in history. And worse things have been inflicted by the U.S. And those events have repercussions through the years. I also liked how Foer mixed graphics, and photos and unique page layouts. I put this novel on a list of books that I wanted to read again in 10 years to see how it would age and if I would still feel the same way about it. Ironically I only read this novel because it was chosen by my reading group and I didn’t know what it was about. I would never have chosen it on my own.

And that’s it for the books on the list. I find that I don’t particularly want to read any of the other novels. Maybe DeLillo’s Falling Man. But not now.

One novel that was not on the list that left a vivid 9/11 impression on me was John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River. I can see why it wouldn’t be on a list of 9/11 novels. It wasn’t about 9/11 or, really, its aftermath. But one of the events to which the novel builds dramatically happens on 9/11. As I said, when I blogged about it:

One of the emotional pinnacles of the story just happens to take place on September 11, 2001. When I first realized that Irving was doing this (which was after the first plane crashed into the tower and a character has the TV on in the kitchen), I was doubtful. But I think he made it work. And one reason it works is because the novel isn’t about 9/11, the novel didn’t lead up to 9/11 or away from it. It just” happened” to happen on the same day as other emotional things happened to the characters. So the characters had to react to it and they had to react in the context of all the other things that were going on in their lives.

Since that’s the way that many Americans experienced 9/11 it really rang true for me. Although the whole day remains vivid for me, in actuality I spent much of that day engaged in parts of my ordinary life doing things that had to get done even though a catastrophe had happened 1000 miles away from me. That’s what Irving captured.

It doesn’t explain 9/11. But it reflects how many people experienced 9/11.

The other novel that sticks in my mind that involved 9/11 was The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt, which I loved so much I read in one sitting. It really isn’t about 9/11 but one of the characters is a little girl who saw the towers fall because she went to school nearby and she is suffering from a type of PTSD. All of the characters, however, have psychological issues in this novel so she doesn’t particularly stand out because of that.

In the end I don’t know that there ever will be a definitive 9/11 novel. But there will, I’m sure, be novels that try to make sense of the period that 9/11 will come to represent. That might be different for different groups of people. For me, 9/11 stands for the first day in a long slow succession of days in which the people of this country more and more questioned whether they really had enough in common with each other to want to continue to put up with each other. The day that question is answered is the day that novelists will start trying to make sense of the process using fiction.

Happy 45th Birthday Star Trek

2011-09-08T20:25:00.001-05:00

I remember watching the original when I was very young. Actually I remember sitting there with my dad when it was on. At the time I liked Lost in Space better (I was young). But I’ve always liked space travel shows. And time travel shows like … Time Tunnel. Ah … television in the 1960’s. Those were the days.

Since I was so young, you can guess which was my favorite episode:

Let’s Kill Hitler

2011-08-28T18:30:00.001-05:00

Ok, Who’s back. Lots of questions answered. Lots of questions not answered. Lots of new questions.

spoilers ahead …

First. I liked the episode. It really made me laugh. A lot. Beginning with the crop circles. It’s always nice to remember that in the UK this is a family hour drama that’s meant to be enjoyed by kids. So laughing and having silly, corny monsters are part of the appeal of Doctor Who. And we haven’t had a really funny Doctor Who story in quite a while.

Second, I loved the Teselecta, which doesn’t really count as a monster but was a good addition to the Whoniverse. And that guy who was the captain? Really handsome. I hope they bring him back. I loved how he kinda sort looked like William Shatner (but better looking) and the set looked like the bridge of the Enterprise. (Although the spaceships in Stargate also had bridges that looked like the bridge of the Enterprise.)

I loved the timey wimeyness of the Baby Melody/BFF Melody storyline. I didn’t mind the closed time loopiness of BFF Melody bringing Amy and Rory together or that Amy named her daughter after her daughter. It makes my head spin but I liked it. I didn’t like Mels herself though and was glad she was gone really fast. I had her pegged as River from the second she showed up and I found out her name was Mels. I was surprised how dislikeable she was though. I should say that, if the girl in the spacesuit regenerated into Mels in 1970, she must (i) age slowly and (ii) have been knocking about for over 20 years before she found Amelia which, combined with the horrors she endured before she regenerated, could turn anyone into a dislikeable person. Slow aging can also explain how River can potentially be around for a number of years at about the same age before she dies in the library.

I liked that (finally!) Rory and Amy were like equals. And when Amy said “I love you” to Rory right before they were going to die – I thought that was the most honest emotional moment I’d seen between the two of them through the whole series. Now maybe we can get past the whole “Does Amy Love Rory” angst and move on to another emotion?

I liked how when the Doctor asked for an interface with the TARDIS we didn’t get Idris (too obvious) but the old companions that the Doctor felt guilty about and himself who he doesn’t like. I’ve felt for a while that part of the story arc for the Doctor these couple of seasons could be self-forgiveness. In the episode called Amy’s Choice the doctor says of his counterpart, the Dream Lord, only one person hates the Doctor that much. And of course he meant himself. And in The Doctor’s Wife Amy accuses him of looking for forgiveness and, in a nice little emotional moment, he says “Aren’t we all?” Ten was such an emotional Doctor; but then he regenerated into Eleven and – well he’s so British now, isn’t he? Keeping it all bottled up inside. I thought those scenes inside the TARDIS where the Doctor is laying on the ground talking to the images was a nice emotional scene and dealt, rather belatedly, with what Ten was feeling right before he regenerated. He needs a companion to keep him honest but he always screws up their lives.

I liked many of the explanations we got:

Why River knows how to pilot the TARDIS (loved it! And loved that the TARDIS had a daughter).
Why River goes by River and not by Melody Pond. If I were Melody Pond and was brought up to be an assassin, I’d change my name too once someone told me that River was cool.
That the Silence aren’t a species. (Although the whole question thing has a real Douglas Adams ring to it that I’m not sure I like. My bet is that the obvious question is Doctor Who? And don’t we all think the Doctor whispered his name into River’s ear when he thought he was dying?)
Loved that the Doctor started teaching River “his’ rules and loved that Rule No. 1: “The Doctor Lies” came from him. Or maybe that was just a clever lie to shut us up?
Not a surprise that the Doctor gave her the Blue Book, but still nice.

So on the whole I liked this episode. Still lots of questions, especially about the Silence and about the Doctor dying (again). And we still don’t know how Rory became a plastic Roman way back when. I didn’t especially like that we found that River became an archaeologist to find the Doctor – I’d rather have had her do that because she was passionate about history etc. And I’d really like to go a whole episode without the whole “A character is going to die!” crap.

It did move fast but not as fast as A Good Man Goes to War, and there were some nice moments of Matt Smith being emotional. On the other hand, the evolvement of the characters within the episode, particularly the beginning of the evolvement of Mels into River seemed rather fast. I went with it but the whole time I was thinking that I could have used a little more help from the production team on that. But that’s probably because for the last couple of days I’ve been considering the importance of directing and editing on television programs.

It’s weird that when we think of television, we seldom think of who the director is. Most of the time we never even pay attention to who the director is. It isn’t like that with the movies. When we think of Lord of the Rings we think of Peter Jackson. Any Martin Scorsese film is, well, a Martin Scorsese film. We may remember Ron Howard as Opie but we go to a Ron Howard film today because he directed it.

And, yes, sometimes the director also has screenwriting credit. But often he doesn’t. Tom Hooper, last year’s academy award winner for The King’s Speech, was directing a screenplay written by David Seidler. Danny Boyle directed Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire but didn’t write them. And we take that for granted. We take it for granted that a screenwriter has a vision of a story and the director and editor and production designer and the actors all work as a team to bring the vision to life. And we usually give the Director equal credit with the actors. At least, I do.

Television seems much more fair to the writer, especially when the writer is also the showrunner (or executive producer). That’s probably because television has such a grueling schedule that no director could direct every episode in a long season. So it is the showrunner who must oversee the overall vision of the show.

But we shouldn’t minimize the importance of TV directors. And I’m beginning to think that we shouldn’t minimize the director in judging how successful a Steven Moffat-written episode is.

During the recent Doctor Who hiatus, I went back and re-watched all the episodes in which Steven Moffat has been credited as the writer, including the episodes in the series in which he was not the showrunner. My conclusion? If I were him, I’d do whatever it took to get Euros Lyn to direct every episode I ever wrote. And get Crispin Green back to edit them.

The duo of Lyn and Green were the director/editors of The Girl in the Library and the Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead episodes that Moffat has writing credit for. And they are beautiful. The stories move along at good clips and never drag but there is plenty of time for emotion. The reaction shots are things of beauty. The cutting between reaction shots is brilliant. There are multiple times in the Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead where action is going on in the foreground but a key character is in the background either engaging in dialog we hear or evolving though reaction shots. Brilliant. A very layered direction of a layered script involving characters with many layers.

I think part of my problem with the current season of Doctor Who, which I have attributed to lack of emotion, can be traced to the direction and editing. Some people, including me, have blamed Steven Moffat’s complicated story arc for leaving no time for emotion and for exploring consequences. But that’s a bit unfair. The more I think about it, the less I think it is a problem with Steven Moffat the screenwriter but with Steven Moffat the executive producer and with the production choices that have been made. Including the choices made in direction and editing.

Yes, the story moves very fast and that leaves little time for emotion. But television is a visual art. Not every part of the story has to be told in words. While words are being said we could be seeing other things that give us emotional responses and/or character growth.

I’ll give you an example from this episode. I thought the evolution of the character who looked like Mels from a character like Mels into what will be River – the moments before she took the step of getting into the TARDIS to try to save Rory and Amy -- were not quite as emotional as they could have been and I think it was because we didn’t see enough of River’s character evolving before our eyes. Was that a problem of the writing? Or was it a camera angle problem?

Obviously, as written, the character evolved. But when the director went to shoot the scene and/or when the editor went to cut the scene, what did we the audience end up seeing? We saw the Doctor (the very emotional, dying Doctor) lying on the floor. We saw a pair of legs in the backround that were the robotic Amy’s legs (that bugged me for a bit because I kept thinking they were supposed to be River’s legs except that River was sitting). Then occasionally there would be a cut to River sitting in a chair and talking. Finally there is a cut to where River gets up and comes into the frame with the Doctor.

But didn’t we need to see her the whole time? Didn’t we need to see her face the WHOLE time? Her character wasn’t evolving only when she was talking. It was evolving the whole time and what she was saying was maybe not the evolution but the results of moments of evolution as she thought about things and listened and watched the doctor. Is there a reason that the scene couldn’t have been shot with the Doctor in the foreground but River visually present in the background the entire time? Matt Smith doesn’t have a very expressive face but Alex Kingston does. She could have evolved River in the background quite satisfactorily in my opinion. It would have added emotion to the scene because it would have showed the effect of what the Doctor was doing and saying on the person who was supposed to be effected. And then River’s words would have meant more.

Look at this scene from Silence in the Library and see how often things take place in the background behind things going on in the foreground. And when David Tennant asks Mr. Lux about the data core we can see Alex Kingston in the background with the smile on her face that later leads up to her egging the doctor with the question “Then why didn’t you sign his agreement”. You can see on her face that she’s a shit-disturber, but then we are distracted for a moment and are still a bit surprised then she asks the question and proves it.

Little things, but they all add up to a brilliant episode. Not just a good story. Not just a well acted story. But a brilliantly realized story. Rewatch those episodes and see how many reaction shots and dialog take place in what would usually be the rear. One of my favorite reaction shots is right after River whispers the Doctor’s name in his ear. Yes, we see a closeup of David Tennant’s brilliant reaction when he says they are “ok” now but then when the scene moves on he is still in the rear of the scene staring at River and pulling himself together before he takes over again and starts demanding answers. Again, brilliant acting but also brilliant camera angles. And editing. All showing us not just what happened but the immediate consequences to the psyche of the characters.

I don’t know anything about the directors for Doctor Who this season but whoever directed A Good Man Goes to War had a galloping story line that needed the emotion to come through visually and I don’t think he succeeded in that endeavor. The Director of Let’s Kill Hitler was more successful. But not as brilliant as Euros Lyn in his Steven Moffat written episodes. And that kind of director is what Moffat needs for his stories. His stories are layered, his characters are layered. He needs a director who directs in layers.*

* Euros Lyn also directed every single episode of Torchwood: Children of Earth. That was a story that could have devolved into melodrama so easily. Instead it held together brilliantly partly because of the direction and editing and was an absolutely brilliant moment of television.

Who is Coming Back

2011-08-25T19:29:00.001-05:00

Charlie Jane Anders has a Wish List for the Fall Doctor Who Season and I basically agree with all of her suggestions.

I’ve been thinking about the first part of Series 6 in anticipation for the beginning of part two (which I’ll have to watch through iTunes). I’ve liked the storyline about Flesh Amy and Constantly Dying Rory and Who is River Song. On the whole I think the Steven Moffat era has been high quality and overall has contained more interesting episodes than the RTD era. But … I do miss the high emotion of the RTD era and I find myself wishing for slightly less complicated puzzling and a touch more emotion.

I’m not really complaining because on the whole I love the Steven Moffat era. RTD era plots were often silly in ways that Steven Moffat episodes are never silly. And during the RTD era there was too much emphasis on the attraction that some of the companions felt for the Doctor. I like that Moffat had the Doctor emphatically reject the idea of any canoodling with Amy Pond. But … the RTD era regularly had episodes that brought tears to my eyes and/or smiles to my face. I don’t find myself tearing up and/or smiling as much these days. Mostly my face has a screwed up look as I try to figure things out.

The thing is, I really like Matt Smith’s Doctor. I like that he is a young actor who plays the Doctor like an absent minded, eccentric old guy. I like that he can pull that off. But I don’t think he’s given enough to work with in terms of emotions. It isn’t that I think he can’t do emotion, I think that he isn’t given enough emotion to do.

The last episode, A Good Man Goes to War, was supposed to contain moments where the Doctor reached his highest high only to be plunged to his lowest low. But the way it was written, things happened so fast that there was no time to feel a high or really to feel a low. I was too busy trying to just figure out what was going on. Highs and lows are emotions. Emotions take time. There just wasn’t enough time. It’s odd that the Flesh story was a two=parter when the whole story could have been told in one episode but A Good Man Goes to War, which could have used 2 parts, was crammed into one episode.

Maybe the problem is that I’ve seen the RTD series. Maybe for those who haven’t seen it, they aren’t missing anything. But compared to the highs and lows that David Tennant (or even Christopher Eccleston) reached during the RTD series, I didn’t feel that this episode was the character of the Doctor’s highest high or lowest low. It’s almost as if Moffat never saw the RTD series. Ten would get angrier and/or sadder during any average episode than Moffat has ever allowed Eleven to be at his very angriest or saddest. And nobody could possibly be higher than Ten at his most manic. Even Nine had that wonderful moment of happiness when the nanogenes figured out that Nancy was the mother of the gas mask child -- which in retrospect makes Nine seem happier than Eleven has ever been. And that was a Moffat script – so he can write highs if he has to. But notice that he built that up for Eccleston to act over a two part episode.

So I’m waiting to see how the second half of the season works out. I trust that most of the loose ends will be tied up and we’ll find out the answers to most of our questions. But I’m still waiting to hit the emotional heart of this season.

It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty

2011-08-21T21:01:00.001-05:00

Persephone Books publishes forgotten fiction and non-fiction by “unjustly neglected authors” and I recently read It’s Hard to be Hip over Thirty by Judith Viorst. Viorst was writing poetry in the 60’s, but it hasn’t aged. Some things have changed. Options for women have opened up, certainly. But being married and having children will always require the sacrifice of certain options. I enjoyed reading her poetry.

Nice Baby

Last year I talked about black humor and the impact of the
     common market on the European economy and
Threw clever little cocktail parties in our discerningly
     eclectic living room
With the Spanish rug and the hand-carved Chinese chest
     and the lucite chairs and
Was occasionally hungered after by highly placed men in
     communications, but
This year we have a nice baby
     and pablum drying on our Spanish rug,
And I talk about nursing versus sterilization
While the men in communications
Hunger elsewhere.

Last year I studied Flamenco and had my ears pierced and
Served an authentic fondue on the Belgian marble table of
our discerningly eclectic dining area, but
But this year we have a nice baby
And Spock on the second shelf of our Chinese chest,
And instead of finding myself I am doing my best
To find a sitter
For the nice baby banging the Belgian marble with his cup
While I heat the oven up
For the TV dinners.

Last year I had a shampoo and set every week and
Slept an unbroken sleep beneath the Venetian chandelier of
our discerningly eclectic bedroom, but
This year we have a nice baby,
And Gerber’s strained bananas in my hair,
And gleaming beneath the Venetian chandelier,
A diaper pail, a portacrib, and him,
A nice baby, drooling on our antique satin spread
While I say how nice. It is often said
That motherhood is very maturing.

Buried History

2011-08-20T18:11:00.001-05:00

The 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis is coming in a few years and so far I haven’t seen any plans for the big event. I have a few ideas of my own. Here’s one. The City ought to sponsor a One Read event and pick a good history of the founding of the City of St. Louis for everyone in the City to read and discuss.

They might want to consider picking the recently published Founding St. Louis: First City of the New West by J. Frederick Fausz. I recently finished it and, even though I’m fairly well versed in the founding of St. Louis, I found it chock full of new information. It offers a lot of good background on the personal and political situation of Pierre Laclede, the founder of the City.

It still doesn’t explain exactly why anyone in New Orleans thought that Laclede was the perfect person to lead an expedition to establish a new French trading settlement at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Laclede didn’t seem to have any experience in traveling the Mississippi or dealing with Indians. But the powerful New Orleans merchant, Maxent, trusted him, took him into partnership and sponsored the trip. And that turned out to be a wise decision because Laclede turned out to be the perfect man for the job.

Fausz does a good job explaining how the end of the French and Indian War laid the stage for the development of a trans-Mississippi French trading settlement. He places colonial St. Louis within its historical context, as a French settlement in a Spanish territory sitting on the edge of an international border. He does an even better job showing how the relationship between the first Missouri settlers and the Indians differed tremendously from what American students are generally taught is the typical confrontational settler-Indian relationship.

Although not utopian, the situation was harmonious. When the Anglos show up to take over the City, after Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, it almost seems a tragedy.

The history of the City of St. Louis was rewritten by the English Americans and is unknown to most of the current residents of this City. There is almost nothing left of the old French capital of Upper Louisiana; it was bulldozed years ago and now lies buried under the grounds of the Gateway Arch – the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. As Fausz points out, Missouri has more memorials to Thomas Jefferson than any other state outside Virginia. History, for most Missourians, starts with Jefferson and his purchase and the first 30 years of the City almost didn’t exist.

Perhaps for the 250th anniversary, the City could do something about that.

Speakin’ English

2011-08-14T18:29:00.001-05:00

I went to see the final Harry Potter movie this weekend. If you’ve never seen a Harry Potter film this is not the one to start with. Mostly because it’s the end of the story and why on earth would anyone start with the end of the story?

But also because it would be incredibly hard to follow if you didn’t know the rest of the story. I had read all the books and seen almost all of the films, including the last one, and I still found myself lost at moments, trying to remember exactly what they were looking for and why. Was it seven Horcruxes and three Deathly Hallows? I think so. That’s a lot of things to be looking for. And some needed to be destroyed and others just needed to be found.

JK Rowling kept it all straight in the novels but didn’t make it easy on the screenwriters. And the screenwriters and film editors didn’t even attempt to make it any easier for the audience. There was no “Previously on Harry Potter” prequel moment and some of the cutting between Harry and Voldemort made it hard to tell exactly what was going on. So, while I enjoyed it, I wouldn’t say it was the best film ever made.

It was nice to see the kids all grown up and finishing what they started though. I foresee a big American film future for Harry and Hermione (Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson). I’m not so sure about Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley. My advice to him, if he wants to make it big with American audiences, would be to choose to do a character with an easier accent for American audiences to understand than the accent he used for Ron Weasley. Or, if he must use that accent, he should speak much more slowly. I watch a lot of British television and film so I’m probably as well attuned to the various British accents as anyone in this country and I missed half of his dialog. For all I know he was pitch perfect with his accent, and bravo if he was. But American audiences are lazy and he needs to make it easier on us to understand him.

But maybe he doesn’t care about America. Which would be fine. There’s loads of great theater, television and film in Britain and we can always see him on Masterpiece Theater or BBC America.

I’ve been thinking about accents lately for some reason. Via James Fallows’ blog, I found this great video demonstrating 21 different accents of English speaking people:

What I found interesting was that I found the accents of non-Native English speakers easier to understand than some of the native English speaking accents. There is a certain Australian accent I find very difficult to understand. I find some London accents difficult. And I often find Northern Ireland accents unintelligible.

Of course there are certain American accents that are almost impossible to understand. I remember reading that the makers of The Wire didn’t want the actors to attempt true Baltimore accents because no one would understand them. When I went to see Winter’s Bone I thought they did a decent job on a softened Ozarks accent but knew they could never have attempted to try full Ozarks accents if they wanted anyone to be able to understand the dialog.

I just saw a trailer for a new movie starring Colin Firth in which he uses an American southern accent – North Carolina, if I remember correctly. I hope he pulls it off. The thing about an American regional accent like that is that most Americans can understand them but most Americans can’t do the accent perfectly themselves (except North Carolinans of course) so we don’t get too picky if it is slightly off. As long as it sounds southern.

I think one reason someone like Colin Firth can be a popular American star using a British accent is because he generally uses an easy to understand British accent. Maybe it isn’t the old fashioned BBC accent, but it is crisp and easy to understand. Combine that with his good looks and you’ve got a “leading man” type here in America. Much the same way that George Clooney uses a standard American Midwestern Accent so that, combined with his good looks, he can be a “leading man”. If, for instance, Colin Firth generally used an estuary accent or if George Clooney generally used a Mississippi accent, they might work a lot but their roles would more likely be those of a “character actor”. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a character actor; in some ways it sounds like a more interesting job than being a leading man.

On the other hand, someone like Michael Caine who started out as a character actor, and is not the typical “leading man”, is definitely a movie star. Michael Caine doesn’t use the lah dee dah BBC accent and that might have kept him at character actor level for all time even though he’s a great actor. BUT I think he broke out of character actor into “actor who can carry a movie” because he speaks at a slow enough pace that it is easy to get into the flow and understand what he is saying.

You notice that none of this has anything to do with actual acting ability. All of these men are great actors, but that isn’t the point. If you are a great actor but no one can understand you, no one wants to pay money just to see you. Rupert Grint should pay attention when he plans his next roles.

Summer Reading

2011-08-13T16:36:00.001-05:00

I haven’t done a book post in a long time. Don’t know why. Here’s what I’ve been spending my time reading this summer.

I read two graphic novels:

Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan. Imagine an alternate Earth reality where chickens are just like humans except … well, they look like chickens. But they remember when they were treated as less than human. And eaten.

Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan with art by Niko Henrichon. When the U.S. bombed Baghdad in 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad zoo. They were eventually killed by US servicemen. This is their story.

Both were quick reads. Pride of Baghdad had beautiful illustrations and Elmer was fairly thought provoking. I don’t read many graphic novels so I don’t have much to compare them with.

I read a few “award winners”:

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It won the Pulitzer Prize. I found it hard to get into and didn’t really care what happened to any of the characters, which is always a problem for me. It is one of those “flashback” stories where you bounce back and forth between the characters as they are now (or in the future) and how they were “back then”. Sort of a “The Way We Were” for the punk rock generation. I can’t really put my finger on why it didn’t work for me except that I don’t really have much interest in examining the lives of self-destructive characters.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. This won the 2010 Man Booker Prize. I guess I would describe this as a novel about Jewish Identity in Britain in the 21st century. I guess. I found this novel easy to get into but then I lost my way in the middle because, again, I didn’t really care about the characters. There were some funny moments in it.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. This won the Orange Prize. It was the best of my “prize winners”. In the end I wish she had written a novel about a women who really really wanted a child and loved that child dearly and the child turned out to be a heart breaker. But that isn’t this novel. Or I wish she had written a novel with this same main character, who never wanted a child and didn’t love her child (at least in the traditional sense), but who had a child who ended up great – but she didn’t care and/or could take no credit. But that isn’t this novel. Having a character who never wanted a child and was a bad mother and whose child ended up being a mass murderer – well it seems just slightly too manipulative and meant to provoke discussions of the whole nature/nurture variety. But given that premise, it is really well done. I’m sure it is going to provoke a lot of great discussion when I get together with others I know who are reading it. Being a person who never deeply wanted kids and who was sure that if I had kids I’d be a terrible mother – it hit home for me in many ways.

I also read a couple of mysteries by new authors (or new to me, at least):

The Mapping of Love and Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel, by Jacqueline Winspear. This is my first Maisie Dobbs novel and it was good lakeside reading. I like historical British mysteries. Sometimes I get tired of the “daughter of the chauffer marries the lord and heir to the title” bit. But not enough for those kind of stories to really bother me. I’ll probably read a few of the others in this series.

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black. Apparently there are eleven books in the Aimee Leduc series. Aimee is a private investigator in modern Paris with a specialty in forensic computer investigations. I really enjoyed this, the first in the series and I’m going to look up the others.

The Flesh was weak …

2011-07-07T19:26:00.006-05:00

Ok. I gave in.

I downloaded the 2011 (half) season of Doctor Who from iTunes and I watched it.   (And may I say how much I dislike that Doctor Who has picked up on this modern invention of half seasons? It’s bad enough where there are 23 episodes so at least a half season would give you 12 episodes. But where you only have a 13 episode season, the whole concept seems absurd. Or particularly exploitative of the audience.   But I digress.)

spoilers ahead…

Let’s talk about the cliffhanger(s) first. I already knew that River was Amy’s baby because I picked it up from the television critic blogs I subscribe to. Usually they are careful about not screaming out spoilers and they give a big warning so I can just skip over those parts and end up surprised. But it was the last episode of the (half) season and that ending blew so many people away that they ended up shouting it from the rooftops. So I knew the secret but I didn’t know how the secret would be revealed.

I have to say that I was very surprised that it was the adult River who revealed the secret. Didn’t that break her spoiler rule? As the episode wound down to only minutes remaining, I expected that the audience would find out the secret but that the other characters would have to find out on their own. It seemed like cheating to have adult River show up and tell them. Having her show up to lecture the Doctor was in character, but telling the secret seemed out of character to me. And it doesn’t make it less cheating to bring them over to the cradle to have them read the name. They could have wandered over to the cradle and read the name for themselves. Amy had the little embroidered cloth for a long time without really looking at it. She could have just looked at it at some moment. And wasn’t it uncomfortable for everyone to have to talk to the adult child? Although comforting, I suppose, to find out that the child survived. Lots of questions raised by that ending. But despite these execution flaws, it was a great cliffhanger and it certainly sets up the second half quite nicely.

I’m not sure I’d classify it as a game changer though. Maybe it will be but it isn’t clear to me yet that it is.

But the cliffhanger of the penultimate episode was a complete and total surprise for me and pretty much a gamechanger for the season. Throughout the series I was prepared to find out that Rory wasn’t real. After all, he was plastic man at the end of the last series and he admits in this series that he can remember those 2000 years. And all season he kept dying but not dying. I was even prepared to find out that an alternate Amy in an alternate universe was pregnant (probably because I already knew the whole River secret so I kept wondering when Amy would finally be pregnant. Not to mention the positive/negatives the TARDIS scans kept showing.) I was even prepared to find out that the whole season was a dream (I was going to be angry about that but I was prepared for it). But that the Amy we were seeing for the entire season (or almost the entire season) wasn’t “real” never crossed my mind. So that was a fantastic ending that had me jumping out of my seat.

Then there is the cliffhanger from the first half hour of the series, where the Doctor is killed in the middle of his regeneration.   Ok, I didn’t see that coming. It was well done – the way it was scripted, filmed, edited. It was really well done. But I also didn’t and don’t believe it. And of course I don’t think I’m supposed to believe it. After all, it's not like the BBC would let them kill the franchise. And they didn’t lock the franchise into having Matt Smith as the Doctor for the next 200 years. Stephen Moffat is very creative but even he is stuck with a format that requires real actors to play the Doctor and, as we well know, real actors do leave the series from time to time. What he might have done was make it possible for Matt Smith to make guest appearances for the next 200 years. I immediately found myself wishing they had done this with David Tennant. But then I rejected that idea. The Doctor is supposed to be gone once he is gone.

Truthfully, in the immediate aftermath I was sort of annoyed by the whole death thing because I saw it as a trick. I assumed, as the characters did, that they needed to go back in time and change things so that the Doctor didn’t die. But that isn’t how things are supposed to work on Doctor Who.   So it couldn’t be anything as simple as that. And yet, that’s what we were all thinking.

But of course we now have the idea that there can be a Flesh Doctor out there to solve the mystery in some way. Yes, even though it appeared that he melted. But the Doctor told him he might survive in some way and, after all, if he really is the same as the Doctor maybe he can regenerate. But only regenerate into a Doctor who looks like Matt Smith?

Here’s my prediction (and I’m notoriously bad at predictions). All of this, in some way, will lead to a clarification about the number of regenerations the Doctor can go through. I think the mythology says that there can be only 12 regenerations, hence only 13 Doctors. We’re already at Eleven. They need to fix that in some creative way. I’m hoping that somehow this will lead into the creative way. I have no idea how.

As far as the overall value of the season so far, I don’t like to evaluate seasons until they are complete. After all, this is a half season, so it is only a set up for the second half. Things could and probably will change dramatically in the next half.

Here’s where I am so far, intellectually and emotionally. Frustrated. But I would be less frustrated if I knew there was a new episode coming up next week and I wasn’t being manipulated by network shenanigans into waiting for the end of the same season.

Why the frustration?

It’s far too much to expect Moffat to rise to the level of 2010 every year and so I’m trying not to. As far as plot goes, this plot is much more intricate and refined than 2010 was (but the Silence better come back and explain the end of 2010 at some point). In 2011, though, the writing is far more uneven. It is, in fact, more like a regular season of Doctor Who. I was glued to my chair for every episode of 2010 but this season I find myself getting up and doing things while it is on in the background. I did that pre-2010 also so this isn’t a huge criticism. I’m just saying that he knocked it out of the park and was the batting champion in 2010 and now he’s back to being just a great .333 hitter.

Granted, some of what I was frustrated with may have been intentional. Well, it probably was intentional. I thought that the beginning of the second episode, Day of the Moon, was sloppy because it didn’t explain how River and Rory escaped the Silence (couldn’t the Silence have just exploded them?) or how the little girl got away. Or, for that matter, how the Doctor and Amy and Canton got away from the Silence and weren’t exploded at the end. Or how the Doctor and River and Amy remembered the Silence to explain it to Canton and hatch their plan
.
And when did Amy get switched? At the end of episode One she tells the Doctor she is pregnant but at the beginning of episode Two Amy says that she’s not pregnant.    In the last episode the Doctor says she must have been switched “before America” but of course the Doctor lies. And why did the Silence want the Doctor to know that Amy is pregnant? I assume that’s the thing she was supposed to tell him. But he isn’t supposed to know something – that he dies? Or maybe he is supposed to know that he dies. But not that she’s pregnant? Or not something else? In the end she both tells him she’s pregnant and that he dies.

There were a lot of things about the Silence that were never exploited. So even though they seemed to have disappeared at the end of episode 2, I feel certain they will come back. After all, one of them was around in 1969 when the Doctor died. I think the whole idea that ideas can be planted in people’s minds while they look at the Silence might be more important than the actual idea to kill them on sight that was planted during the Moon Landing.

I also thought that Day of the Moon was a little over the top with the orphanage scene. I mean, why on earth would Canton and Amy have even gone into that building? Have they never seen a horror movie? When a building has “GET OUT” written (in blood?) on the walls, well … you know what to do. Get Out!!! I did love that a British series thinks that a 19th century building like that would exist in Florida outside a theme park.

Although the two-part story of the Flesh was incredibly important for the overall development of the story, I found the writing for it somewhat pedestrian and very much horror movie of the week. And although the Doctor kept saying we should give the Flesh a chance, Jennifer did become a monster. But I was pretty surprised when the Doctor melted the Flesh Amy at the end of the episode. After all, he kept saying the Flesh deserved a chance. So why melt her? I know he said he had to break the connection but … it just seemed like he would have given some thought about how to preserve Flesh Amy as well as real Amy.

The pirate episode was well filmed (very Pirates of the Caribbean in feel) but again seemed like typical episode of the week fare and at times I found my mind wandering. I admit that by the end of the series I was starting to get tired of Rory almost dying every episode but they more than paid that back with the Flesh Amy reveal. The Pirate episode also showed how very real Flesh Amy was in her emotions. But maybe it explains why she stopped CPR and gave up. I expected the Doctor to have to pull Amy off of Rory’s cold dead body to stop her. One highlight of the pirate episode was seeing Hugh Bonneville as the captain. I always enjoy him no matter what role he plays. But here’s a question, if the other ship lived in a parallel universe, how did they get into OUR universe for the Battle of Demon’s Run?

I liked the concept of Neil Gaiman’s episode about the TARDIS being a woman, but even it sort of dragged toward the beginning. But then the story picked up when the plot line became clear. I liked the TARDIS as woman, even if she looked like she was Helena Bonham Carter’s poorer sister. I’m sorry she won’t talk anymore. And again, the emotions of Amy over the supposed death (again) of Rory, combined with the Pirate episode of the previous week, was good cover for Amy not really being Amy.

Of course, the whole episode was worth Amy accusing the Doctor: “You want to be forgiven” and his response “ Don’t we all?”   Also her statement about him being a Time Lord: “It’s just what he’s called; it doesn’t actually mean he knows what he’s doing,” LOL!

And, while it wasn’t completely out of character for the Doctor to suggest, after the two part premiere, that they go on an adventure instead of finding the little girl, I thought it was odd that nobody brought up even the hint of the idea of finding the little girl ever again. Maybe Amy being Flesh Amy was the explanation for her forgetfulness but what about Rory and the Doctor? (But how totally Stephen Moffat is that? To put a little girl in danger and leave that situation hanging out through the series. His use of children in Doctor Who is wonderful.)

But that leads me to the biggest problem of the series for me so far, which has been this gnawing feeling that Moffat has changed the Doctor in some essential way. And part of it has to do with River. Back when Ten met River he didn’t automatically like her or trust her. And that was understandable even beyond the shock of meeting someone from his future. Here was a woman who was using the same type of blaster that the Ninth Doctor chastised Captain Jack Harkness for even possessing. The Ninth Doctor didn’t automatically like or trust Captain Jack either. Jack had to become a hero and prove himself. Well, River gave her life for the Tenth Doctor so I guess she proved herself.

But going through holes in the walls opened by blasters is a far cry from the Doctor standing outside the TARDIS with River and saying that “unlike me she really doesn’t mind shooting people” and admitting that should bother him but doesn’t. Huh? Of course it should bother him. He’s the Doctor. It was a great scene for Alex Kingston but it seemed completely out of character for the Doctor.

Seeing her blast the Silence into oblivion was a great scene – but in Doctor Who?. Did Stephen Moffat get his Rivers mixed up and bring us River Tam in Firefly, built to be a weapon? Killing a few people in the blink of an eye? But, of course, we find out in the last episode that River Song is meant to be a weapon too. And that is what was wrong about that scene. That the Doctor is not the least bit upset that she is weaponized? Shouldn’t he be just a tiny bit upset by her prowess with the gun? Even if he left before she began the real shooting spree, shouldn’t he have been upset by the beginning of the spree? And being the Doctor, wouldn’t he just know that she had a shooting spree? The whole thing seemed weird to me.

And the Doctor didn’t give them the Silence a real chance. He started to and then he stopped himself and said he wouldn’t because it wasn’t Christmas. Huh? The Doctor’s plan to get rid of the Silence using Neil Armstrong was far more Doctor-like. But it still involved having the entire world use guns! How far is this from the Tenth Doctor having Martha get everyone to just think his name to save the world? (Oh, and what about that little moment with the Doctor flirting with River in the middle of the shoot out scene? Really? I don’t think so. Not even David Tennant’s Doctor, who had women flinging themselves at him right and left, ever had a flirtation scene like that. But again I digress.)

Think about it. From the moment the Doctor came on the screen this season, guns were there and accepted. River shot his hat off of his head. The Doctor himself is shot. River shot up the Silence. The Doctor programmed all of the world to kill the Silence on sight and we see scenes of guns being drawn. Amy pulled a gun on her own daughter twice this season (granted she didn’t know it was her daughter.)

If this is all about the Doctor setting foot in America then I wish he had stayed in the UK.

And what about the last episode? There is no evidence that the Cybermen were involved in the plot having to do with the baby and yet the Doctor just blows up their space ships and kills hordes of them to threaten them into telling him where Amy is? Really?

Yes, I know that the Ninth Doctor threatened the Daleks when they held Rose. But they held Rose. From what I could tell, the Cybermen had nothing to do with Amy. What ever happened to always giving a warning but no second chances? What ever happened to the Fourth Doctor wondering if he had the right to exterminate the Daleks? And how the hell could Rory walk right into the den of the Cybermen and survive? And why, oh why, was Rory in a Roman costume again?

And what about the Doctor in the last episode calling in his debts? Even from people who don’t want to help? Has that ever happened before?

In fact the very beginning of this season was just weird. With the Doctor doing things to get into history books and showing up in the Laurel and Hardy movie. What were Amy and Rory supposed to do even if he was trying to send a message? They don’t have the ability to time travel on their own. And it seems so out of character for him just to be causing trouble for the sake of causing trouble.

Russell T. Davies cast his Doctors with a Nine who looked like he could beat you to a pulp in a dark alley and a Ten who turned into an action hero at the drop of a hat. But they had a code that they stuck to. And Ten especially had a lot of angst attached to his ruthlessness.   The casting of Matt Smith seemed to be a return to a more traditional Doctor. And I liked that. He’s a bumbling professor type. He’s eccentric. He thinks bow ties and a fez are cool. He’s a very comfortable Doctor. He’s a doctor that children could be comfortable around immediately. Which doesn’t make him any less the Doctor than it made the old-time Doctors the Doctor.

I get that Stephen Moffat wants to deconstruct Nine and Ten and the Russell Davies era of Doctors. He is removing any aspect of the action hero. This Doctor is not going to be jumping out of spaceships and crashing through glass ceilings onto marble floors below (how did Ten survive that?) And I approve. Although I miss some of those action hero aspects.

Moffat may be trying to take the Doctor back toward his roots and, if so, making the Doctor come to grips with how much he has changed since the Time War is one path back. But even the action hero doctors didn’t act like Moffat has Matt Smith acting this series. They didn’t cheer when fighters were overhead taking out “the enemy”. It seems like the Doctor has degenerated since his regeneration. Moffat has, in some ways, made him worse than Nine or Ten in ways I find hard to believe.

I spent a part of 2010 wondering what David Tennant would have done with Stephen Moffat’s scripts, but the 2011 scripts are completely tailored to Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor.   I can’t imagine Ten in these 2011 scripts. This is not to say I can’t see DT playing them. Of course he could, he’s a great actor. But having the Tenth incarnation of the Doctor in the scripts would change everything because he was a fully formed character. You need a new version of the Doctor to play these scripts. You can convince yourself that you don’t fully know his character and I suppose you can doubt yourself when you wonder if the Doctor would really do these things.

The one thing that Matt Smith really brings to the role is a real sense of disbelief that he could ever be seen as anything but a power for good. No matter how he has used his power, the Doctor has always been sure of his belief that he uses it on the side of right. Even when he does terrible things. The Doctor comes in at the last moment and saves the day. The Doctor is who everyone looks to when the day needs saving. And last season he found out that all of his traditional enemies blamed him for the rift in the Universe and this season he finds out that his use of all this power, unchecked, has resulted in the Universe being terrified of him. That a nice young girl thinks of him only as a great warrior. It really seems to shock him.

Perhaps this isn’t just the season that the Doctor visits America. Perhaps this is the season that Stephen Moffat uses the Doctor as a metaphor for America in the 21st century.

Or not.

Anyway, on the whole I’m liking the season but I wish they hadn’t split it up and I’m somewhat worried that Moffat is going to let the changes to the Doctor get out of hand.

A few odds and ends:

It is interesting that when I first saw the Flesh I thought “Oh, this is a way to get the older River out of the computer.” But then the Flesh were portrayed as dangerous and I wasn’t so sure. Some of them became fully human, but others turned into monsters (literally). The Doctor made a big deal about Amy being prejudiced and yet then he destroyed Flesh Amy without a qualm. So maybe it isn’t such a good idea to put River’s consciousness into the Flesh.

Was the Doctor who died at the beginning the regeneration of the Flesh Doctor? But Amy asked if it was a clone or a duplicate and old Canton said it was most certainly the Doctor (although how could he know?). Maybe technically a regenerated Flesh Doctor is the real Doctor? I wondered where the TARDIS was in that scene and why was the Doctor was driving a station wagon. And if he was the Flesh how did he have a matching TARDIS blue diary to compare with River? Unless she never realized there were two Doctors (if there are two Doctors). Rory even said something like that to her at the Prison, joking about there being two Doctors.

I loved River this season. Aside from the scene where she spills the beans, I thought she was perfectly written. I don’t think she and Matt Smith have good chemistry though. She and David Tennant sizzled together. She and Matt Smith seem cute together but I don’t really see the possibility of attraction (and I loved that he gave her the code name Mrs. Robinson). But if they are really going to introduce the character of River as a child, Matt Smith will be perfect. I can’t imagine a better Doctor for a child to meet. Certainly not from among the new era of Doctors. Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant could do it, but they were really much more adult versions of the Doctor. Matt Smith could easily be a kid’s Doctor. It was very cute when he spoke “Baby”.

Who were all those allies that the Doctor recruited in the final episode? The Victorian lesbian Silurian who solves crimes. Have we seen her before? The Sontaran who was forced to act as nurse. Have we seen him before? We’ve seen the fat guy before – with River. But never with the Doctor. For that matter, who was the army arrayed against the Doctor? Who are the headless monks? Even the forest people are new. Have we seen any of them before? Part of me wondered if we were in alternate universe world and this was our clue.

If River is the little girl, why doesn’t she remember the whole space suit episode?

Underground tunnels in Florida? Get real. They can’t even have basements there.

I’m thinking that the Good Man that River kills will be her own father, Rory. When Rory goes to the prison he has to tell River who he is. So she hasn’t seen him in a good long while. Maybe doesn’t even remember him. (I wonder how far ahead in the story Alex Kingston has been briefed.)

So that’s it. Many months for us to speculate.

Oh, and one more thing. I wonder what the significance of 1969 is for Stephen Moffat. That’s the year that he sent the Tenth Doctor and Martha back to during one of his earlier episodes, Blink. But I’m pretty sure they were in London and not America, so it is unlikely they will run into the Eleventh Doctor. Although maybe they do and maybe that’s what rips the Universe apart.

Captain Jack’s Almost Back

2011-07-06T23:08:00.001-05:00

Reviews of the new Torchwood are starting to come out and it premieres on Friday. Over the last couple of months I’ve been reading some bloggers who have been watching Torchwood in preparation for the new series. I’ve noticed that those who don’t want to watch Doctor Who seem really confused about Captain Jack’s background.

So I present the only Doctor Who scene you have to watch to kinda sorta understand Jack’s past. In this scene he has re-joined the Doctor for the first time since his very first death at the hands of the Daleks. The Doctor has been less than welcoming to him. But then, suddenly, the Doctor volunteers Jack for a mission in a room full of radiation that is certain to kill anyone who enters. Jack, of course, goes along with the plan.

It really is a nice scene. The Doctor seldom gets to talk to a man his own age who isn’t an enemy. And this might be one of John Barrowman’s best scenes as Captain Jack. And as a bonus, you get glimpses of Derek Jacobi trying to remember what he has forgotten. That isn’t important for these purposes, but I always like to see Derek Jacobi.

Hello Eleven

2011-07-02T16:27:00.002-05:00

I just finished the 2010 season of Doctor Who and I’m quite liking Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. I worried that, after being swept up in David Tennant’s tour de force performance as the Doctor, I wouldn’t. But I do. I like him and I like what he has done with the role.

I think it helps that Smith has had great scripts to work with. In fact on the whole I think he had better scripts to work with as a whole in 2010 than David Tennant did over all his years. DT was saddled with the whole silly Rose story his first season. He inherited Rose as a companion and inherited her relationship with the Doctor. It also seemed as if Russel Davies wasn’t quite sure in what direction he wanted the Tenth Doctor to go. Or, at least, couldn’t let the character go there until Rose was out of the way. There was a lot of silliness in the scripts DT had to work with in his first season but by his second season he was firmly ensconced in what would be the Tenth Doctor’s persona. A combination of wonderful people-person and arrogant all-powerful being.

Smith, on the other hand, entered into a story that seemed to know exactly where it was going from the first episode. He got a brand new companion so there was no need to provide any continuity between the old and the new. But he did inherit River Song, who was one of the best characters from the DT era. I think that helped. And of course Smith got Stephen Moffat as the show runner and chief writer.

I do keep finding myself wondering what DT could have done with the 2010 scripts, since he was so wonderful in the Stephen Moffat stories that were given to him during his tenure. But he’s gone and Smith is here and I’m enjoying Smith’s performances.

The Eleventh Doctor’s chief characteristics seem to be manic energy combined with intense thoughtfulness. Manic intensity? So far he doesn’t seem to have the angst that the Tenth Doctor had. The Tenth Doctor reacted to his difficult regeneration by slipping into a coma-like state; the Eleventh Doctor reacted with ravening hunger. The scene where he has Amelia make him lots and lots of food, none of which he likes, and then settles on fish sticks dipped in custard was funny. It was almost like he was pregnant. And he was – pregnant with a new doctor who wasn’t yet fully formed and out of the womb yet.

I worried that he was too young. The Doctors seem to be getting progressively younger looking while the Doctor himself continues to age. But there is something about the combination of Matt Smith’s eyes and the way that he plays the character that makes him seem older than DT’s Doctor. Whereas DTs Doctor had to come to grips with the danger that he himself posed to the Universe, the Eleventh Doctor seems to simply accept that he is powerful. (In that way he reminds me of the much older Doctors). He almost seems tired of it. The Tenth Doctor had a certain edge to him that made him seem dangerous – culminating in the Time Lord Triumphant scene in The Waters of Mars. The Eleventh Doctor doesn’t seem dangerous at all. He just reminds aliens of the fact that he could be dangerous if he wanted to be. And they believe him.

Compare the two, both of them in episodes scripted by Stephen Moffat in scenes with similar themes – he’s the Doctor and doesn’t need to prove anything. Here is David Tennant’s Ten – “I’m the Doctor, look me up”:

Now compare Matt Smith’s Eleven in his very first episode. Again he reminds the alien that he is the Doctor and makes the alien look at his history. It’s a longer scene because it sets Smith within the history of all the previous Doctors (I particularly like how they run images of the past Doctors and have him walk out of the image of the Tenth Doctor). But his “basically … run” moment is much more calm and controlled than Ten ever was:

Ten was a Doctor in the heroic tradition – always rising to the occasion is a big way. But then beating himself up a bit after. Very Shakespearean, as befits an actor like David Tennant. When Ten tells an alien to watch out because he’s the Doctor, his eyes blaze.

Eleven is a Doctor who looks and sounds like an ordinary guy even when confronting the bad guys, but who really isn’t an ordinary guy. He’s a more tired Doctor. When he says “basically … run” his eyes don’t blaze. You know that he means it, but you also can tell that he’s said it many, many times before. He looks almost tired of having to say it one more time. So in an odd way, Eleven seems older than Ten even though the actor is younger.

At the end of the 2010 Season, the Doctor gets locked in the Pandorica. The Doctor says “Think of the fear that went into making this box”. He says that it was meant to hold a “nameless terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies.” Nothing could stop it or halt it or reason with it. He had no idea that it was him.

I think if DT had acted that scene I might very well (MIGHT) have guessed that it was the Doctor it was meant to hold. The Time Lord Triumphant who is beyond reason with no one to restrain him. But that version of the Doctor was redeemed when he sacrificed himself for an old man. And he has been regenerated into a Doctor who has the power to destroy galaxies but really seems to not want to think about those kind of things anymore. He just has to keep saving the universe because that’s what he does. So I could understand Matt Smith’s Doctor’s surprise when he found out that it was him it was meant to hold.

The other thing I like about the 2010 season is the Doctor’s companions, Amy and Rory. I enjoyed Rose during her time with the 9th Doctor. Nine needed someone to bring him out of himself. If Eleven is manic intensity, Nine was manic moroseness. Rose was more sympathetic than Nine in many ways. I remember wondering, though, if the creators of the New Doctor Who didn’t trust that the actor or even the character of the Doctor could carry the show without a strong companion who could take the full focus off the Doctor. I feel a bit the same way about Amy. Having her be such a strong character really worked in this first Smith season. It let Smith ease himself into our imaginations.

But I didn’t enjoy Rose so much the second season. DT could have carried the show from the first moment he appeared on screen; yet the writers couldn’t relegate Rose to a fully subjugated companion position. So they wrote the love story that every Doctor Who fan knew could go nowhere and could only end badly. It wasn’t until the Tenth Doctor got Donna as a companion that they worked out a good modern buddy-relationship between Doctor and companion where the Doctor was the full focus but the companion was a good foil. In fact, the writers went so far as to have the Doctor travel for a time without a companion but gave him story lines that proved he needed a human to restrain him. In a way, it was a way to justify him having companions at all. So the character of the Doctor needs a companion to rein him in even if the actor playing the Doctor can carry the show himself.

Amy seems to be a bit of a combination of both Rose in the first season, keeping the audience’s entire focus off of the new Doctor, and the outspoken Donna. In general, I like her. I didn’t mind that she was the center of the entire first season for Eleven. And I liked that they brought back little Amelia at the end of the season. As I said in a previous post, Stephen Moffat seems to be good at writing scenes for children.

Eleven and Amy have good chemistry but it isn’t sexual (although they do enough to keep us guessing at mid season to keep things interesting). Rory is very likeable so I don’t wish or expect Amy would dump him in the way that Rose dumped Mickey. And it is nice for the Doctor to have a guy around. It happens so seldom.

The story arc for this first Eleven season was written in a way to keep my attention although I’m still not sure I completely understand how the rift in the Universe happened in the first place. I liked the way they used the River character during the season. Alex Kingston does such a great job with that character. Yes, I did find myself wishing for DT during those episodes because the two of them had such great chemistry together on screen. But she and Smith do fine together.

All and all a good season of Doctor Who. We’ll see how I feel after another season. By the end of the Tenth Doctor I had grown very fond of him and was really sad to see him go. So far I like Eleven but I don’t feel the same strong attachment. Not yet. But he has time.

I’m considering downloading the 2011 episodes from iTunes so I don’t have to wait for it.

The Daughter of the Regiment

2011-06-29T21:12:00.001-05:00

Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment is a lovely bit of fluff which, although I saw it a few weeks ago, I’ve saved for my last OTSL review because it was so much fun.

It is a comedy. Tomboy Marie was found as a baby on a battlefield and was adopted by an entire regiment of French soldiers. All of these fathers pose a problem for the young man, Tonio, who wants to marry her. Eventually he joins the Regiment to prove his worth. But in the meantime Marie’s “Aunt” finds her and takes her away to be trained as a lady and to marry a Duke. Fortunately, the “Aunt” turns out to be Marie’s mother and so, as a bastard, she isn’t eligible for the Duke and gets to marry Tonio. Simple plot, lots of high notes to hit. The part of Tonio made Luciano Pavarotti famous because of an aria that contains a whole lotta high “C”s.

Rene Barbera hit all the “C”s effortlessly. Ashley Emerson’s Marie was perky and, although I might have wished for her voice to be slightly stronger, she sang well. She was a good actress and made a very believable Marie. Dale Travis, who played her principal “father”, was a delight and he was a good actor too and his scenes with Emerson were delightful. Dorothy Byrne, as the “aunt” was a good comic actress. Her lower notes were a little bit lost but it didn’t matter.

One of the highlights of the evening was the return of Sylvia McNair to the OTSL stage playing the Duchess of Crackentorp, whose role was expanded from a few moments of comedy to include a musical number. McNair, who no longer does opera, was delightful and the audience loved it. She had a few nice moments interacting with conductor John McDaniel in the pit.

McDaniel did a great job and no one would have known this was the first opera he has conducted if we hadn’t been told by numerous newspaper articles. He kept things moving at a nice clip and kept the orchestra from overwhelming the singers. There wasn’t a moment in the performance where the orchestra and the singers weren’t as one. Full disclosure requires me to say that I know McDaniel, a native St. Louisan, from long ago but that isn’t influencing me when I say that I hope they have him back for another opera (if he wants to take time off from Broadway, of course).

The costumes were colorful and the scenery was fun. There was lots of movement and the scene where Marie is supposed to be learning the ballet is hilarious.

All in all, it was a wonderful night at the opera. My group agreed that it was the most enjoyable opera of this season. I was not able to see Peleus and Melisande so I can’t compare it to that, but it certainly beats The Death of Klinghoffer and Don Giovanni for entertainment value.

Here’s the link to OTSL’s video preview and again, I have no idea why they don’t make them able to be embedded. (And again, I can’t get it to play correctly on any of my computers).

A Little Aside about Who’s Stephen Moffat

2011-06-26T19:57:00.002-05:00

I’m more than halfway through the 2010 season of Doctor Who, the first season with Matt Smith as the Doctor. This is also the first season where Stephen Moffat took over as show runner. I went back to look at the episodes that Moffat wrote for the other seasons of Doctor Who and realize that he wrote almost all of my favorite episodes.

In the Christopher Eccleston era he wrote the two part story The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. It was a great “historical” episode, capturing the life of orphaned, homeless children during the London Blitz. It introduced us to Captain Jack Harkness. It reflected a period of growth for the emotionally damaged Ninth Doctor who learned to dance again (with all the double entendres that entails). I thought that it was the most creative episode of that season, with the “monsters” being ordinary people living during the London Blitz who had been turned into zombie like creatures with gas masks fused to their faces. And what was especially scary was that the principal “monster” was a little boy looking for his “mummy”.

In 2006, for David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, he wrote the Girl in the Fireplace, the episode where the Doctor meets Madame de Pompadour. The creativity of this episode was that it combined great “historical” drama with futuristic space drama since the Doctor and his two companions were stuck on a spacecraft in the future which contained windows into 18th Century France. The relationship between the Doctor and Reinette is beautifully written and it is a serious story but still has great comic bits (I love the horse on the spaceship).

Much of the first season of David Tennant involved the Doctor in situations where he reacted with his “silly Doctor” persona. But in Girl in the Fireplace Moffat gave Tennant scenes of quiet intensity and Tennant took them and ran with them. And again Moffat created new “monsters” in the clock/clown people (I’m sure they have a name but I don’t know what it is). He also proved that he is just very good at writing scary scenes that involve children:

Then in 2007 he wrote Blink. I know I’m sounding like a broken record when I say that it is one of the best pieces of television I’ve ever seen. David Tennant’s Doctor is barely in it and the story is carried by Carey Mulligan before she became a well known actress in the United States. Again, he created new “monsters” with the Weeping Angels, incredibly scary but very simple (and cheap) creatures who don’t move if you look at them directly. They turn to stone and look like statues. But the minute you aren’t looking … watch out. I may never look at stone statues the same way again. I don’t even like to put a clip of it on, because I don’t want to ruin it with spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen it. But here’s an early scene that doesn’t give much away:

In 2008 he again wrote one of my favorite two part episodes: Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead. Of course I loved the concept of the little girl and the library in her mind just to begin with. Again, a great use of child actors. Again, he created really scary but very simple (and low budget) monsters – just shadows really, but shadows that eat the skin off of people. Forest of the Dead was an especially good vehicle for Catherine Tate’s character Donna Noble. I always hoped (and still continue to hope) that Moffat finds a way to reunite Donna with the guy she met in the virtual world (yeah, I know she’s now married to someone else but …).

And of course those episodes introduced us to River Song. I’ve now seen River reappear in the 2010 season (with the Angels) and YES I’VE SEEN ARTICLES WITH SPOILERS from the 2011 season but I don’t want to talk about it or the remainder of 2010 until I actually see those episodes. But I loved River in that 2008 season because she was the first human woman character I can remember in Doctor Who who not only acts as an equal of the Doctor but who proves she is as much of an equal as any human is ever likely to be. And although I don’t like sexist behavior in men or women, I have to admit to a chuckle at this scene:

The really, really nice thing about these episodes is that Moffat got such great actors to play the parts he wrote. He of course had David Tennant, but he also got a great actress to play against DT with the casting of Dr. Corday, oops I mean Alex Kingston. (Funny, I seldom watched E.R.but the moment I saw her I thought “oh look, there’s Dr. Corday”). David Tennant always is at his best when the actor on the other side is great and the scenes with he and Kingston together were wonderful. DT was always good at the talking side of the Doctor, spewing forth lines of dialog in record time episode after episode, but here, with a wonderful script by Moffat and playing against Kingston, his reaction shots show his incredible strength as an actor:

Oh heck, I’m going to throw in one more scene. I love the following scene for the lighting and the camera angles and the way that the Doctor and the TARDIS are facing each other like people. It is just beautifully filmed. And I also love it because David Tennant never says a word, the story is in his face. River has previously said that the Doctor (HER Doctor) can open the TARDIS with a snap of his fingers. The Tenth Doctor (who doesn’t yet trust that he really has met River in the future) disputes this and says it is impossible. But here at the end, after an emotional separation from River, he comes back to his TARDIS and tries it out …

In 2009 there was no series, only a few specials that culminated with the regeneration of the Tenth Doctor into Eleven and the end of the David Tennant era and the beginning of the Matt Smith era. Moffat had no part in those specials except that he wrote the final moments of The End of Time part 2 which introduced Matt Smith’s Doctor.

I didn’t realize all of this when I started watching the 2010 season. But as I watched the first episode of 2010, which again involved the Doctor (the Eleventh Doctor) working with a child and a scary (low budget) crack in the wall, I started to think that there were some parallels with earlier episodes I liked. Then, when I saw the return of the Angels and River Song, I finally decided to look him up.

There’s no point to all of this other than that I like to pay attention to specific writers once I figure out I like his or her work. Once I discovered all of this I wasn’t surprised to learn that Moffat had a hand in the new modern, updated Sherlock that ran on PBS last year with Benedict Cumberbatch. He co-wrote A Study in Pink and has creative credit on the series.

So you know what’s coming from me, don’t you? Yes, of course you do.

I’d like to see Stephen Moffatt and Jane Espenson do something together. And since she’s just worked with former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies on Torchwood maybe that’s a possibility? Maybe? Pretty please?

The Death of Klinghoffer

2011-06-25T12:14:00.002-05:00

The chorus was magnificent. This might have been the finest choral work I’ve ever heard in an opera production. Every word was intelligible and every measure was pitch perfect and the intensity was palpable.

Conductor Michael Christie was a joy to watch in the pit (as he was during Ghosts of Versailles) and he had the orchestra and the chorus in perfect balance. There were times during the very difficult music that every eye in the chorus was trained on him and he brought them through safely.

If only I had liked the music they were singing.

I’m just not a fan of John Adams’ music. So it is high praise indeed from me when I say that I, at points in the performance, thought that I’d like to hear the choral pieces again sometime outside the confines of the opera.

The opera opens with the chorus singing the “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” and then moves immediately into the “Chorus of Exiled Jews”. The chorus never leaves the stage. I would guess it was close to a half hour of choral singing. And I tip my hat to costume designer James Schuette because with the adjustment of a shawl, a change of handbag, the losing of a hat, the chorus changed identity so completely between the two pieces that they might have been different people.

After these two long choral works the action of the opera begins, if you can call it action. This is, of course, the story of the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by a group of Palestinian terrorists and the killing of wheel chair bound, American Jewish tourist Leon Klinghoffer. The two long choral pieces at the beginning set the stage for the political situation.

OTSL’s production of this opera is the first staged United States production since it was staged in 1991. This is, apparently, a controversial opera. OTSL spent a great deal of time and money on community outreach. OTSL General Director Timothy O’Leary described it as “educational events designed to help the production inspire the kind of informed, thoughtful dialogue among diverse groups that the arts have a special power to help create.” I didn’t go to any of them but I know people who did go and found them very informative.

My biggest problem with the opera wasn’t the subject matter. It was the libretto. During most of Act I we are told what happened to characters but are seldom shown what happened. I’ve noticed this a lot with modern opera librettos. Characters stand on stage and sing at the audience, telling them a story. Let’s face it, most operas involve singers standing on stages and singing at audiences. But usually they are singing about their interior lives. Usually love. Often rage. Sometimes despair. But modern operas seem to eschew the steamy emotions and prefer to simply tell us about the character’s actions. So we hear … And then I went to my stateroom and there I washed my face and then I went to find some lunch. It’s like Facebook status updates set to opera music.

I find it really boring. And when it is combined with John Adams minimalist style it is usually a recipe for me to go to sleep and most likely leave at intermission. I barely made it to intermission when OTSL did Nixon in China. So the fact that I stuck it out to the end of Klinghoffer tells you just how much I enjoyed the chorus.

Of course one reason that this particular group of chorus members may have sung this particular opera so well is that the blocking for this particular opera was also minimalist. Mostly non-existent when it came to the chorus. They often stood in rows on stage, facing the conductor, and sang. They didn’t have to sing and dance around and interact with other each other and the main characters. They just had to sing. And they even, at one point, sang touching each other’s arms which must have been a huge help in timing their breathing so that the long, utterly beautiful, sustained notes just floated around the theater.

It would have been nice to have some choreography or, at least, a little more movement. But at least we had the glorious sound of their voices.

Kudos also to Christopher Mageira, who played the Captain and who was outstanding. The others in the cast were also quite fine.

In the end, I would say this was a brilliant production of an opera that I never intend to see again. But I’m glad that I saw it once.

Here’s a link to OTSL’s multimedia preview of this opera (although I can’t get it to play correctly on any of my computers).

Torchwood: Children of Earth

2011-06-21T20:48:00.001-05:00

Ok, everyone was right. Children of Earth was a game changer for Torchwood. Before CofE Torchwood was an enjoyable but uneven program that couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to emphasize science fiction or detective story. After CofE Torchwood is a Serious Television Show.

When all the children on earth freeze for minutes at a time and then start to recite the same words together, well that’s a clue that something is going on that might not be of this world. So far, pretty typical. But then the writers set us up to believe that a new character is going to join the Torchwood team only to reveal that he is part of a group working against Torchwood. Then we find out that the government has ordered a hit on Captain Jack because … well, we don’t know why. Then the government tries to kill Captain Jack but he can’t die, even when he’s blown up. Then they decide to encase him in concrete. It’s all very exciting but all the time there is a big scary alien coming that has something to do with the children.

Then when Torchwood finally manages to force its way into the situation and take control of the situation, it all goes horribly wrong. And the ending. Captain Jack had a hard choice to make and he made it.

Lots of deaths. Lots of people important to Jack dying because of Jack.

After all that, who can blame him for deciding he needed some time away and beaming up to the nearest starship a la Arthur Dent. He must come back to earth though because I hear he’s in the new series that starts next month.

Last time I wrote about Torchwood I said that they needed to create either a Big Bad institution or a Big Bad person for Jack to go up against. I also said I didn’t think that Ianto and Jack didn’t have any chemistry and I wouldn’t be sorry to see him go.

They created a governmental Big Bad that was a bad as anything I’ve ever seen. There is a scene where the government is trying to decide whose children to sacrifice to the alien and they decide it can’t be the children of the elite, not their children. It was a pretty chilling scene as they made the decision that it was the low achievers who had to go. So it was a good Big Bad to put Jack up against. It allowed Jack to be Jack without any necessity of toning down his act.

And they got rid of Ianto. I admit that I was sad when he died. But I still didn’t think that he and Jack had chemistry. I’m going to admit here that it went through my mind at the end of Season 2 that Ianto was a double agent sent to infiltrate Torchwood and be a honey trap for Jack. I never believed that he really cared for Jack. He had more passion for the robowoman in Season 1 than he ever showed for Jack. But, in CofE I did believe that he cared for Jack. I still didn’t think they were good together but I stopped thinking that the writers had some evil plot that hadn’t yet been revealed. But now that he’s gone, I’ll drop it and just say I’m sad he had to die a horrible death.

So now we wait for the next season, which I won’t see because I don’t have cable. Coming off of CofE, I have high hopes. Plus Jane Espenson is one of the writers. Plus they are moving part of the action to Los Angeles. Normally I wouldn’t be excited by that but I think Jack in Los Angeles could be fun. Los Angeles is BIG and Jack is BIG. And the people of Los Angeles … well they seem kind of alien to me.

I continue to think that Jack plays better in a setting that is a little, oh, less than normal. Los Angeles is certainly that.

I tried to watch Torchwood and Doctor Who in the order in which they aired. So I saw the last few Doctor Who episodes after the end of CofE. In the episode where the Tenth Doctor dies and regenerates, he has a chance to visit all of his friends one last time and do something nice for them. In one scene he looks up Captain Jack. Jack is in a space bar (very reminiscent of Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars). So the Doctor gets to see a lot of the aliens he has encountered in this lifetime as well as Jack.

It seems right that Jack is in a bar. He’s lost Ianto and he’s lost a member of his own family. He’s sitting at a bar drinking. He’s not the same Jack. And the Doctor gives him a little push to get back into the human scene. Sure, this scene could have been a Torchwood scene. But Torchwood took place in Cardiff. He would have been sitting in a bar in Cardiff and the lighting would have been dark. Very Torchwoodesque and dark. But since this scene took place in Doctor Who, they could set it in a space bar and make it Really Fun! And that’s what Jack needs – a really fun setting. Because his character is Really Fun. And as I watched that scene I thought …. Yeah, this could be Los Angeles.

See what I mean:

There was this guy …

2011-06-20T22:21:00.001-05:00

I’m still in the throes of Tenth Doctor withdrawal.

Here’s the lovely scene where the Doctor says goodbye to Sarah Jane … finally! Only six Doctor Lives after he should have said goodbye properly. David Tennant was only a child when the Fourth Doctor left Sarah Jane behind on earth. I think he played this scene with Elizabeth Sladen beautifully. And it makes it even sadder to know that she recently died.

It’s funny. I don’t have any desire to go back and watch old Doctor Who episodes for the old Doctors. But I might want to go back and watch Sarah Jane.

Goodbye to Ten. It has been an honor.

2011-06-19T15:32:00.001-05:00

I’m now up to the Eleventh Doctor in the Doctor Who Series. Before I jump fully into Matt Smith’s version of the Doctor I want to take the time to think about David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. I’m really going miss Ten. What a terrific Doctor.

In David Tennant’s first episode an alien invader demanded of the Doctor “Who are you?” and the Doctor bellowed back in a mocking voice “I don’t know!” This was literally true because the Doctor was still in the midst of regenerating, leaving behind Christopher Eccleston’s excellent 9th Doctor and becoming something totally new. But it was also the theme that the writers and David Tennant would spend the next few years exploring..

The series was given the gift of a highly talented actor in Tennant and the writers took full advantage of that in crafting situations that really stretched the Doctor’s concept of who he was.

Spoilers ahead.

As I said before, Tom Baker was my Doctor. I didn’t grow up with him as a child; I was in my early twenties when PBS was re-running Doctor Who. But he was my first Doctor and he shaped all my expectations.

Of course, in some ways it is silly to compare them. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. The nature of television has changed over the years. There are new production values. Audiences tolerate more. Audiences demand more. The Tenth Doctor couldn’t have existed in the 1970’s any more than the Fourth Doctor would excite audiences in the 21st century. So at some point I stopped comparing them in my minds and simply accepted that they were different.

It was good to ease back in with Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor, before being bombarded with Ten. As we picked up the story line with the 9th Doctor, it seemed that many of the Doctor’s existential battles over whether he had the right to exterminate the Daleks had been long ago fought. Not only had the Doctor exterminated the Daleks, in doing so he had exterminated his own race and was the last remaining Time Lord.

The 9th Doctor is very much alone when we meet him. He is a Doctor who is still dealing with the immediate personal after-affects of his choices even though he doesn’t doubt he has done the right thing. Even after he takes Rose on as a Companion, he is still dealing with the arrogance in his nature that it took to wipe out your own race. He is a Doctor who, in an early episode, decides against all advice that it was a good idea to let a race of aliens arrive through a time rift to inhabit (even temporarily) human corpses, and then he must watch as that decision turns into catastrophe. He is a Doctor who pleads with some unknown power in the universe for a group of little computerized nanogenes to recognize the DNA of a mother and turn her son back into a human boy; this Doctor pleads to the universe that Just This Once Please it will turn out well and people will live. He is very much living day to day and doesn’t seem to be thinking ahead to what he should become. And yet, every time Rose makes him laugh, you can see that the essence of the fun loving Doctor is in there somewhere. And he learns how to dance again.

Eccleston seemed like a Doctor who wasn’t so pleased with life that he was sad to leave it. It is only his interactions with Rose that makes him sad to move on; but his exit is stoic. Nine seemed at peace with the idea of regeneration perhaps because he had never been completely comfortable in his own skin.

Yes, Eccleston’s Nine was a good transitional Doctor.

And then came David Tennant’s Ten. David Tennant inhabited the Doctor completely and totally in a way I haven’t seen since Tom Baker and in a way that Tom Baker didn’t. In the end it always comes down to the words on the page and the actor’s ability to convey the words and their essence to an audience. And. He. Nailed. It. He killed it. Yes, the fact that he is an award winning actor certainly helps. The fact that he’d wanted to play Doctor Who all his life probably helped. But the main thing was that he seemed to love being the Doctor. Which is, perhaps, why it was particularly poignant when it came time for him to move on. “I don’t want to go” were his very last words. And I believed him.

Ten was a multilayered character in what was essentially a children’s cartoon series. Think about how hard that is to pull off. Let’s face it. Doctor Who has never been a series for sophisticates. It has always required an audience willing to completely suspend disbelief in the face of cheesy 1950’s style monsters. And the updated Who didn’t update the monsters very much. The Daleks and the Robomen were shinier but were still cumbersome robots. That’s why it was nice for the writers to make Ten’s final foes live actors. I always think human actors are more fearsome than cheesy robots.

No, Doctor Who has always relied on the character of the Doctor to carry the show. And the writers gave Tennant a character that he could fully inhabit from the beginning and then they and he began to stretch that character as far as it would go. Ten’s Doctor was a Doctor who spent almost the entire first episode asleep because the regeneration was so difficult. This should have been our clue that he was coming back a fully new man, unlike any Doctor we’ve ever seen.

This was a Doctor who, from the moment he appeared, was funny and sort of whacky but then could be utterly ruthless when necessary. He believes it is always necessary to give everyone a chance and sometimes those chances could go on for a very long time. Butthere are “No second chances” he said in the first episode as he ruthlessly killed the alien with nonchalance. In one episode he patiently went into hiding from a group of aliens who are out to get him. He strips himself of his Time Lord powers and becomes totally human so that they won’t detect him. Is that because he is afraid of them? No. By hiding he was giving them a chance to move on and not incur his wrath. They don’t and ruthlessly takes care of them.

Ten is a Doctor who takes delight in the wonders of the universe and sharing those wonders with everyone around him. He is unabashedly outgoing, he seems to be a born people person. And yet the fact that he is alone permeates every scene and he is, ultimately, so lonely. And Ten is a Doctor who is angst ridden in a way that the Doctor is seldom angst ridden. And clever. Too clever: “It's not like I'm an innocent. I've taken lives. And I got worse, I got clever. Manipulated people into taking their own.”

And boy could he talk. Words just spewed out his mouth as thoughts raced this way and that way through his mind. It was hard to keep up with him. He could be a lot of fun.

Where Nine seemed to wonder why he bothered so much with the human race (so backward, so irrational, so helpless). Ten unabashedly loved earthlings. He loved them even when he disapproved of whatever they were doing. Love was, perhaps, the defining feature of Ten and that made his wrath so powerful. Ten was perhaps the most godlike and the most human of the Doctors - all at the same time.

All of that is makes for a difficult character to write and a difficult character to act. It requires a character to change on a dime and it requires a character who can be moralistic one moment and a great pal the next. And Tennant did it, seemingly effortlessly.

I’ve seen multiple Doctors regenerate and I admit that when Tom Baker ended his run it was a scene that brought tears to my eyes even though I knew in advance it would happen. But I was unprepared for how emotional the end of Ten would be. The end of The Death of Time left me unabashedly crying. The look on David Tennant’s face as he moves from joyous wonder that he is still alive, with music soaring in the background, to the look on his face the next second when he hears the four knocks that prophecy his demise was worthy of an award all on its own. The light literally went out of his eyes and they became blank as he (and the camera) turned to face his fate.

And how appropriate that Ten didn’t die saving the entire human race (again) but died to save one man. One useless old man who even told him – leave me. I’m old, leave me. And it is true. As Ten says, “look at you, not remotely important. But me... I could do so much more.” Oh, how Ten railed against his fate. He does not go quietly without a fight, even if the fight is only with himself. It’s not fair! he shouts. He is so human at that moment. But no one is forcing him to do it, no one CAN force him to do it. It is his choice. Or perhaps he realizes that it is one of those fixed moments in time that cannot be changed. It is his time. And he faces it with grace. “I’d be honored.” I think the moment he says that pretty much sums up the Tenth Doctor.

After watching that episode I wondered if Russell Davies was a long ago fan of Jesus Christ Superstar. Because that scene had a touch of Gethsemane about it. Very much gospel channeled through rock opera.

And then another surprise. He’s not gone. This is a long slow death that allows him to come back out of the death chamber and walk among his followers once more for a limited time. Leaving them something to remember him by. If it sounds very archetypal it was. And it could have been terrible but it all worked. I weeped.

But that was at the end. I also laughed, I laughed a lot, through all the seasons. So I want to end with some general thoughts picking up where I left off the last time.

Donna annoyed me at first but she grew on me. I thought what happened to Donna was sadder than what happened to all the other companions who were simply left behind. On the other hand, even though she grew on me I was ready for her to move on and I was glad she didn’t carry over into a Companion for the next Doctor.
Whatever were the writers thinking when they wrote the end of Journey’s End? They should have left Rose well enough alone where she was. This is Doctor Who – we all knew they couldn’t end up together. They had a very poignant goodbye at the end of Season 2. Leave it at that. It was ok to have that little moment at the end of the End of Time when the Doctor tells her 2005 is going to be a really great year. That was nice. But having her end up with the Other One? That was just dumb.
I loved that Sarah Jane was brought back to the series. She is still my favorite Companion. I hope that at some point the writers recognize the death of Elizabeth Sladen by making the Doctor mourn the death of Sarah Jane. In the first episode she appeared in, the moment when David Tennant sees Sarah Jane across the room was just magical. He played it so well. I wondered if they were going to write it so that she never knew he was the Doctor. But having her find the TARDIS and then realize it was him was perfect. And the end of that episode when he called her “my Sarah Jane” and hugged her was somewhat cathartic, after the Tom Baker episode where he showed almost no emotion when she left. And her other cameos was nice too.
I still think “Blink” was one of the best episodes of television ever.
I loved how the first David Tennant episode had the Star Wars reference with his hand being cut off a la Luke Skywalker and the last David Tennant episode had the Star Wars references with them shooting at incoming starships (not to mention the space bar with Captain Jack). Nice balance.
Rude and not Ginger. Why do I think Ginger is going to be an ongoing theme – yes I’ve seen three episodes of the Matt Smith Doctor. Here’s the brand new Doctor discovering he’s rude but no red haired.

Here’s another scene with with Martha (who I really liked) that also includes Captain Jack AND Sir Derek Jacobi (I was really excited when he appeared in an episode). The whole hand thing always did creep me out:

On to Eleven. From what I’ve seen so far he will be fine. Although he seems soooo young.

Oh, and Torchwood to follow at a different time.

The Big Man has left The Band

2011-06-18T20:38:00.002-05:00

Rest in Peace Clarence Clemons. You will be missed.

Torchwood

2011-06-10T19:58:00.001-05:00

A number of weeks ago, when I had finished watching all the seasons of Stargate Atlantis on streaming Netflix, I said that I was going to start watching the new Doctor Who. I was a Doctor Who fan back in the Tom Baker days and I stayed through most of the Peter Davison days too. But then I stopped watching and then it went off the air. I don't have cable so I never got to see the new Doctor when he regenerated but through the magic of streaming Netflix I can now catch up.

I was told by people I trust that I should also watch the spinoff, Torchwood. I was already intrigued by Torchwood because I had heard that Jane Espenson, my favorite television writer, was scripting part of the next season. So I looked up the lists of episodes of Doctor Who and Torchwood, figured out the order they would have aired, and started in.

At this point I've seen the first three seasons of Doctor Who and the first two seasons of Torchwood. I wouldn't usually write about them in the middle of watching all the seasons but I saw that Alyssa Rosenberg is also watching Torchwood, to catch up in anticipation of the new season. And then I saw that Ivey West at Cliqueclack is also catching up on Torchwood. Both of them are writing about it while in the middle and I found myself agreeing with some of what they are writing. So I thought I'd throw out my thoughts after two seasons and then see if they took any of my advice for season three.

First, I love Captain Jack. But I loved him more on Doctor Who. I was sad when the Doctor and Rose left him behind at the end of the first season of new Doctor Who, but I assumed that they didn't know he wasn't dead. When he showed up on Torchwood I understood why the writers didn't want to give away his entire background and make him mysterious to new viewers and leave some mysteries for Doctor Who fans. Such as ... how the heck did he get to the 21st century from the future where the Doctor and Rose left him?

I think the reason that I liked him more on Doctor Who is because he is such a BIG character as written and John Barrowman really took that character and ran with it on Doctor Who. Of course he could do this because whoever plays the Doctor, they always play him BIG. So the BIG Doctor and the BIG Captain Jack could play off each other. PLUS they were travelling through time! There isn't really any reason to play Doctor Who as a realistic show - it isn't. It never has been. It's like a cartoon or a comic book so the actors can play the characters BIG like a cartoon character or a comic book character.

But Torchwood is stuck in the 21st century (at least most of the time). And all the people who work at Torchwood are just regular people who happen to believe that aliens exist exist and the earth needs to be protected. And Captain Jack was stuck on earth beginning in the 1800's (don't ask) and all through the 20th century. I he had acted as BIG as he acted on Doctor Who .... well, it's beyond belief that he would have been able to fit in. So, of necessity, the writers had to tone him down and Barrowman had to play him a little smaller. I understand that. But I like him when he's BIG.

I think the show needs a regular character who plays it BIG. Maybe a big bad. Or a crazier member of the Torchwood team. When James Marsters guest starred it was magical. The character was written BIG and nobody can play BIG like James Marsters. And that let Barrowman loose to play Captain Jack BIG. Wow. And that made the reaction of the other normal members of the team even more realistic. At the end of season 2 it was clear there were going to be cast changes and I hope that means that they came back in Season 3 with a BIG new character.

The other thing I think they need to do is to anchor the idea of Torchwood better than they have. Season two of Doctor Who gave us lots of hint dropping about the Torchwood Institute and most of the publicity was negative. We were led to believe that the Torchwood Institute was not necessarily a good thing - although it wasn't an unqualified evil either. It was very ambiguous. But the concept of Torchwood doesn't play off that. The Cardiff branch of Torchwood is (apparently) the only branch of Torchwood left after the Canary Wharf war and they are trying to "do the right thing". It would be much more exciting if they were fighting the system. Even the unabashedly militaristic Stargate often showed the Stargate team in conflict with the institutional military. And was better for it. Alyssa pretty much says the same thing:

Similarly, the fact that Torchwood Three appears to be the only functional branch of the institute isn’t actually a good thing for the show. We don’t get a training montage that really introduced Gwen to Torchwood’s practices and traditions, which would be both a fun thing to do, a great way to introduce viewers to the world the creators are building, and a good way to establish the constraints Torchwood agents work under. Without constraints, it’s hard to know what it means to be a Torchwood agent. As is, they’re basically private dicks who know that aliens are out there. My understanding is that we get more context later for why Torchwood Three is what’s left. But even if, and especially if, they’re what remains of a tradition, that should be an interesting burden to carry out, a legacy to carry on, something that should be part of Gwen’s experience and ours.

Maybe they'll pick up on this in Season 3.

Those are my main issues with the series. I really like the character of Gwen and I think they can do more with her. And I really like her boyfriend/husband. Tosh and Owen are obviously off the show after Season 2 and I don't think I'll miss them. I liked the quietness of Tosh's character but it just didn't play well with a Captain Jack who needed to be BIG. Same with Owen. The same characters without a Captain Jack may have worked although it would have been a totally different kind of show. But if they are going to have Captain Jack they need characters that set him free.

Truthfully I'd be fine if they'd ditch Ianto too. I don't think that he and Jack have any chemistry. Which is weird because Jack has chemistry with pretty much everyone else who crosses his path. He especially had chemistry with James Marsters. But I just don't feel the chemistry with Ianto.

But on the whole I've really liked it and I'm looking forward to watching Season 3. It was a surprise to find that Doctor Who and Torchwood are only 13 episode seasons. After watching the 22 episode seasons of Stargate, this seems too short.

I also really like the new Doctors (both of them). Tom Baker is still MY doctor but I think David Tennant is coming in a close second. I was tired of Rose by the time season 2 ended and was glad she was gone. And I totally object to the whole love interest issue - this is Doctor Who for gosh sakes. THE COMPANIONS AREN'T LOVE INTERESTS. I was irritated that they had Martha hitting on him but at least he wasn't interested - which is as it SHOULD be on Doctor Who. It's a kid's show. No kissing!

But I've pretty much loved it. Even the rehabilitated Daleks, which remain just as corny as ever. And I think that Blink was one of the best episodes of television I've ever seen. Right up there with the Buffy episode Hush.

I've just started Season 4 and I'm pretty sure that Donna is going to drive me crazy. But at least she isn't hitting on the Doctor. Whew.

Gotta go watch another episode.

Don Giovanni

2011-06-07T19:43:00.001-05:00

Two years ago, Opera Theatre of St. Louis produced the most exquisite production of Mozart’s Il Re Pastore. As I said at the time, the voices were perfect. Clear, with perfect diction. I think that people can have different ideas about what constitutes the perfect voice to sing Mozart. In my book, the singers in that production of Il Re Pastore were the perfect Mozart singers.

Last year, OTSL produced Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. I wrote that, although I enjoyed the performance, I thought that it was, musically, a little bit sloppy. And although I enjoyed a few of the voices, I didn’t like Maria Kanyova’s performance because her diction was poor. And the orchestra and the singers didn’t seem together sometimes.

This year, OTSL is producing Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni is a womanizer and possibly a rapist, who murders the father of one of his proposed victims at the beginning of the opera. Throughout the opera he is unrepentant and at the end a statue of the murdered man comes to life and tells him if he doesn’t repent he will go to hell. He goes to hell. It’s a long opera (as are most Mozart operas) and there is a lot of decadence and carousing and people impersonating each other during that time. It isn’t my favorite Mozart opera and I think I’ve only seen it two other times. But it is Mozart and I’ve always enjoyed it before.

I thought about not even writing about this production. As Thumper’s father said, if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. But I do have a few nice things to say. It was worth the price of admission to hear David Portillo’s Don Ottavio. He had what I consider the perfect voice for Mozart – clear, ringing and perfect diction. I wouldn’t say he was the best actor of the bunch, but Don Ottavio is a bit of a stiff character anyway. Kathryn Leemhuis was also very good as Zerlina, a country girl who is spotted by Don Giovanni on her wedding day but manages to fight him off. Andrew Gangestad was The Commendatore, the statue who comes to life, and he was so mesmerizing in his scene toward the end that I didn’t even notice that the conductor disappeared at some point to be replaced by someone else in the pit. His voice was simply perfect, although I rather wish they had staged him up on a pedestal so he would have been physically more imposing.

The other singers worked very hard to put on a fine performance in less than ideal circumstances. The fact is that they all had lovely voices – they just weren’t my ideal Mozart voices. If I had been casting this opera I would have cast others. But they did a fine job. Maria Kanyova, who I adored in Ghosts of Versailles, gave a moving performance although she was once again plagued by terrible diction. Although when she was singing with David Portillo he seemed to bring out the best in her.

If the production behind the singers hadn’t been such a mess, I would be telling you that it was a fine production despite the fact that the voices were not my perfect Mozart voices. But it wasn’t a fine production.

It isn’t even the problem that I didn’t like the set or the costumes or the lighting. Although I didn’t. The costumes were all from different time periods and didn’t go together. That was just weird. The set was boring and the lighting was too dark and it made me want to go to sleep. Which is not something you need in an opera that is over 3 hours long. And while I get that Don Giovanni was hosting an orgy – the background “choreography” in the scene at the end of the first half was just far to distracting. Background actors should enhance the lead actors and NOTHING should distract from the music. The choreography did both.

But I might have even been able to get beyond all that if it had been a clean production. I often go to productions that I think are OK even when I don’t agree with the choice of set or costumes, etc. But the production last Thursday was just a mess, beginning with the overture. The overture to Don Giovanni is pretty famous and it sets the tone. And at OTSL the orchestra is made up of the Saint Louis Symphony so it isn’t as if there are a bunch of amateurs playing. But the overture was muddled. Then the first 10 minutes of the opera were almost unintelligible. The diction was so bad that even the recitatives were beyond comprehension (and for some reason they don’t put supertitles for the recitatives, so we had no help). I’m inclined to blame the conductor, Jane Glover. And since she disappeared before the end of the production I’m wondering if she wasn’t feeling well and that affected the performance. The final sextet was the clearest and most cohesive bit of music in the production and it was done under the direction of whoever it was that took over in the pit and the singers had their eyes glued to him. Other than that sextet, there wasn’t a moment in the opera where I listened to the voices blending and didn’t think – “but they aren’t blending!”

But the absolute worst moment in the opera was toward the end of the second half when Maria Kanyova was singing a lovely and melancholy aria. The scene was being changed behind the curtain and it sounded for all the world like the entire cast had donned army boots and were marching up and down behind the curtain. There were loud sounds as scenery was moved. It almost became funny. All the people around me were looking at each other with their eyebrows raised.

I didn’t go on opening night so it wasn’t as if there were still kinks to be worked out. I delayed writing this. I don’t really like to write anything about OTSL that is not mostly glowing. This is the 25th year that I’ve had season tickets. So I thought that maybe as I thought about it more this week I would feel less irritation. But I didn’t. Maybe the other performances will be cleaner. I hope so. Because OTSL has a reputation to maintain.

Oh, one other good thing about the performance last Thursday. As we walked into the theater one person in my group said that she had never seen an audience at OTSL with so many people who were younger than us. Which is great! It’s a shame they didn’t see OTSL at its best.

Click here for a video about the production. And no, I have no idea why OTSL doesn’t produce videos that can be embedded. But they don’t.

A Gifted Man

2011-05-19T19:19:00.001-05:00

I’m not usually into television shows about ghosts – except for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir which was on when I was a kid. But “spiritual” ghosts usually don’t interest me.

But I just discovered that Jennifer Ehle is going to be starring in a new CBS drama called A Gifted Man that has been picked up for the fall. She plays the ex-wife of surgeon Michael Holt who has come back from the dead to … teach him the meaning of life. Ok, ok. It sounds incredibly silly. But … Jennifer Ehle! She was the perfect Elizabeth Bennet in the television production of Pride and Prejudice that starred Colin Firth.

And to top it off, Julie Benz is on it too. I’ve always liked Julie Benz since she played the receptionist in As Good As It Gets who asks Jack Nicholson how he writes such great women characters. And of course she was a great Darla on Buffy and Angel. I watched some episodes of her No Ordinary Family that was recently cancelled and really liked her in it. So I’m glad she’s in a new series that got picked up.

The pilot was directed by Jonathan Demme. I’m finding it hard to think he’ll be a regular director for television but I guess stranger things have happened.

Click the link to see a preview.

Stargate Atlantis

2011-05-16T20:30:00.001-05:00

I haven’t felt much like reading lately, too busy reading for my job to want to read in my free time. So I’ve been using streaming Netflix at night before I go to bed and catching up on television series that I missed the first time around.

First I watched Veronica Mars, all three seasons. I wrote about it here. I just finished watching Stargate Atlantis, all five seasons.

I’ve written before about how much I enjoyed Stargate SG-1 and how I was disappointed by Stargate Universe. So I wasn’t sure what to expect from Stargate Atlantis.

I liked it. I’m not sure I liked it better than SG-1 but I liked it. I think, in many ways it was better made than SG-1 (at least better made than the early years of SG-1), with higher production values. It had a lot of the same kind of humor. And there was real synergy among the cast.

Most of the cast I was not familiar with, at least in the first three seasons. The exception was David Hewlett who reprised his Rodney McKay character from SG-1, but tempered to make him more bearable. In season 4 they brought in Amanda Tapping’s character, Samantha Carter, to be the commander of the base. I love the character of Sam Carter but really felt that the writers didn’t know what to do with her. I was sorry she was gone in Season 5 and was not sure that replacing her with Roberto Picardo’s long running character, Mr. Woolsey, would work. I shouldn’t have doubted him. Picardo had been playing Woolsey on SG-1 for many guest appearances and, once made a regular character, did a great job showing the growth of his character (some of you will remember Roberto Picardo as the holographic doctor on StarTrek the Next Generation).

You may recall that one of the problems I had with Stargate Universe was that the writers did not create a unique “Big Bad” for the new galaxy. Stargate Atlantis didn’t have that problem, they created a big bad right from the beginning and they were very Big and very Bad. The Wraith were scary. They looked scary and the concept behind them (that they fed on human lives) was scary. Not scary like the Reavers on Firefly, who literally raped and ate their victims. The Wraith were less monstrous and more alien. And one of them, Todd the Wraith, was a sometimes ally. (Todd, you ask? Well, they had to call him something.)

Another difference between Atlantis and Universe was that the writers didn’t hesitate to kill off characters. Well, they killed them off in the way that Stargate characters get killed off – they come back as clones or memories or whatever. But they do get killed off. Stargate Universe needed to kill off some characters.

Like SG-1 and unlike Universe, Atlantis was filled with strong women characters. The leader, Elizabeth Weir, is a scientist and no pushover. Teyla Emmagan, a member of the team of explorers, is an alien woman who is the leader of her people. The Wraith have queens who are VERY scary. In Season 4, Jewel Staite joins the cast as a doctor and while she is not a military person, she is a smart and capable doctor. There are, in fact, more strong women characters than there ever were on SG-1. Universe, of course, had women characters who bored me.

The other cast members were very good. I’d never seen Joe Flanagan in anything before but his portrayal of the main character, major (then colonel) John Shepherd, was very winning.

In general, I think five years is long enough for a series to run. I thought SG-1 got a little tired by the last few seasons. On the other hand, I have no idea why they shut down Atlantis and replaced it with Stargate Universe. Atlantis was a much better show.

So now … what next. I’m thinking … Doctor Who?

Rare and Special

2011-05-01T14:37:00.001-05:00

Saturday night at the Symphony was one of those far too rare nights when the audience was so excited by a performance that total strangers felt compelled to talk to each other about it. The occasion was the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto by the Saint Louis Symphony with guest artist Stephen Hough.

I am not that familiar with the Second Piano Concerto, although I’m sure I must have heard a recording of it at some point in my life. After all, I love Tchaikovsky and I love piano. So I must have heard it at some point. But I don’t remember it and I know I’ve never heard it live.

Unlike the First Piano Concerto which I heard a couple of weeks ago at the symphony, the Second Piano Concerto seems more thematically coherent. It also features virtuoso moments for the pianist, especially in the first movement, in which he can play solo in a cadenza-like section that is very long.

Hough is a brilliant pianist and by that I don’t just mean that he is technically brilliant, although he is. I again sacrificed acoustics for sight lines and sat orchestra level on the side where I could see the pianist’s hands. There were moments in which his hands were moving so fast that they were actually a blur. I’m not exaggerating. His notes are crisp and clean and his pedal work is inspired. But that isn’t what makes an awe inspiring performance. There are many technically proficient pianists out there who give fine, but not particularly special performances.

What made this performance breathtaking was the almost symbiotic relationship Hough had with the orchestra. They were as one. Compare this with the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto which featured Yefim Bronfman in which Bronfman played beautifully from a technical point of view. But he and the orchestra were not as one in parts of the piece.

Some of the credit for Saturday night certainly goes to Ward Stare, SLSO’s Resident Conductor who did a fine job. He’s very young (or at least very young-looking) and I predict will be evolve into a popular conductor with audiences because he conducts in the dramatic style that audiences love to watch. But the orchestra sounded perfect under him and if there wasn’t complete musical sympathy between he and Hough, it was not apparent.

But even technical fireworks and a symbiotic relationship with the orchestra aren’t enough to raise the hair on my arms and send tingles up them as happened to me on Saturday. There is … something. Some undefineable musicianship where an artist seems to be not only at one with the other performers but at one with the piece being performed. Hough clearly loves performing this work and finding the moments in a particular performance of the work with a particular orchestra and a particular conductor. Sometimes it all comes together as it did on Saturday.

That is the beauty of live performance. The work may be a classic, performed time and again, but the performance is unique. There will never be another performance exactly like Saturday night’s performance. It is rare to witness a performance where all of the pieces come together, it is usually enough when most of them come together. But when they all come together in a unique moment, the audience is part of the specialness and when the lights come up total strangers turn to each other and say “wow. Just wow.”

Hough will be back with SLSO to perform the first three Rachmaninoff piano concerti next year. I want to be there for all three. And I’m not going to sacrifice sound for sight – I want the best sound I can get to enjoy those performances to the max.

A Stephen Hough Preview

2011-04-25T21:45:00.001-05:00

Stephen Hough is coming to St. Louis to play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. Here is a three part interview done with him a couple of years ago in which he discusses playing Tchaikovsky.

He points out that Tchaikovsky is physically tiring for the pianist – all of those big chords. But he also sees an innocence in Tchaikovsky and thinks it is important to balance the two sides of Tchaikovsky.

In part 3 he discusses working with conductors, including prior performances with David Robertson. He won’t be playing with Robertson in St. Louis. Ward Stare, the SLSO’s Resident Conductor, will be on the podium.

Tchaikovsky–Part One

2011-04-17T17:14:00.001-05:00

A Saturday night at the St. Louis Symphony is a fine way to spend an evening. I don’t know why I don’t do it more often. I always intend to go more but then time gets away from me. If I don’t have tickets in advance I don’t think to go.

Last fall I saw that the SLSO was performing the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 AND Piano Concerto No. 2 this season. I love Tchaikovsky and I love piano concerti so I bought tickets for both. This past weekend was the First Piano Concerto. The orchestra was under the direction of David Robertson and the guest soloist was Yefim Bronfman. It was a fine performance although I thought the performance got better as the work progressed.

The opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano concerto is very famous with the piano and the orchestra playing together. When piano and orchestra play simultaneously there is a chance that the piano might tend to get a bit drowned out by the orchestra. That almost but didn’t quite happen last night. But that also might have been my choice of seats. I’d much rather sit in the balcony at Powell Hall because I love the enveloping sound up there. But I wanted to see the pianists hands so I chose orchestra level seats over to the side. That might have accounted for the not-so-perfect acoustics. I also felt that the there were moments (only moments, and rare ) where the orchestra and the pianist were not performing “as one” , but as they moved into the second portion of the first movement they began to work off of each other as they should and that feeling went away.

I’ve heard this concerto so many times that I didn’t think it was possible to have a new thought about it. I’m always struck anew each time I hear it how the first part is so different from the rest of the concerto and how the rest of the concerto sounds like bits and pieces of one of his ballets (I always think of it as pieces of music rejected from Sleeping Beauty – which is not to say it is anything but exquisite). But this time, as I listened to the second movement, I suddenly thought that it was as if the piano was intended to be the ballerina. Perhaps it was the way Bronfman approached the work, but I thought it was quite charming, more charming than I normally do.

The second half of the program was Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 in E Minor. Shostakovich is not my favorite composer but I didn’t mind this one. There were parts that were a little boring but the second movement galloped along and was quite thrilling. The symphony sounded superb under Robertson and made me want to go back and hear them again.

Which will happen in two weeks when I return to hear the Tchaikovsky Second Piano Concerto. This time the guest pianist will be Stephen Hough who is also one of my favorite bloggers.

For your listening pleasure here is Mr. Bronfman performing the third movement at the Herkulessaal, Munich Residenz conducted by Mariss Jansons. They took it slightly faster than SLSO did. You can see the physicality required to perform this.

Wherein I finish my Veronica Mars Marathon …

2011-04-15T23:15:00.001-05:00

OK. Now I get it.

I mean, I watched the third season of Veronica Mars back in Real Time because many people told me I should. And I liked it. I was sorry it got cancelled. But I can’t say that I loved it. That’s because I didn’t really get it because I hadn’t seen Seasons 1 and 2.

I liked the Nancy Drew aspects of the series, but I didn’t really understand why Veronica had this incredibly boring boyfriend named Logan - who lived in a hotel, which just seemed weird.

I kept thinking that Veronica needed a real boyfriend. She needed to get together with that guy Piz, who clearly liked her and seemed like a normal college guy. He lived in a dorm room. He worked at the college radio station. But then she did get together with him, and I found myself unsatisfied.

Then the series ended.

A couple of weeks ago when I was doing my taxes and having my annual lovefest with the shredder, I discovered that all three seasons of Veronica Mars are on streaming Netflix. So I started watching. And now I get it.

I have no idea why the writers decided to drastically change Logan in Season 3. I suspect it was intended to be a transitional year. After all, they put him through a lot in the first two seasons. Pretty much every important person in his life died – except for his best friend who ran away to Australia. And Veronica. Now that I’ve seen the first two seasons I can understand the season 3 Logan much better. And the character seemed to be transitioning toward the end of the season into someone better. Someone like an older version of the younger Logan, it turns out. But then the series was cancelled so there was nothing to transition to.

But now I get it. And I’m sadder than ever that Veronica Mars was cancelled.

More About St. Louis in the Civil War

2011-03-21T22:01:00.001-05:00

The St. Louis Post Dispatch looks back at the incidents leading up to the City’s loss of control over its own police department back during the civil war. And the death of 35 citizens and soldiers.

I’m not sure how I feel about the 150th anniversary observances of the Civil War. It was ugly and bloody and other than writing about it and maybe laying a few wreaths at Arlington and other national cemeteries, I’m not sure we should be doing much more. But I suppose Civil War re-enactors demand more. From an article last week:

A re-enactment of a bloody riot on Olive Street will be the first big attraction among local observances planned for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

*****

Missouri's secessionist governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, had mustered the state militia to the site of present-day St. Louis University in hopes of seizing the U.S. arsenal on the Mississippi River at Arsenal Street. Troops under Union Capt. Nathaniel Lyon marched to the militia camp, named in Jackson's honor, and quickly obtained its surrender. But as Lyon assembled his captives on Olive near Compton Avenue, gunfire erupted between troops and mob.

Do we really want to re-enact things like this? I know it is history but do we really need to re-enact it? Someday will there be a re-enactment of the Watts Riots? Why would they consider this? And “events” like this will be held during the four year commemoration of the War.

But of course, history buffs travel. And spend money.

"St. Louis has a big story to tell in this watershed period of our nation," she said. "History buffs, known in our business as heritage travelers, stay longer and spend more money than typical travelers."

I don’t know why this bothers me so much. In general, historical re-enactments fascinate me. But this state is so divided right now that it wouldn’t surprise me if the re-enactment of the Civil War led to more division. Really and truly – I’m pretty sure there are Confederate sympathizers still living in Missouri.

Frank Aufmuth, an organizer of the Camp Jackson event, said re-enactors from at least 10 states would form up near the north entrance of the St. Louis County park. He said the scene in 1861 was a confusion of blue-clad Union soldiers, allied German immigrant units in plain clothes, surrendering Missouri militiamen wearing blue or gray uniforms and an angry mob all around them.

Yep. That’s what we need. Staged angry mobs.

An Interview with Dorothy Dunnett

2011-03-20T20:02:00.001-05:00

Via DunnettCentral on Twitter I found this video of my favorite author Dorothy Dunnett when she was interviewed back in the early 1990’s. I was particularly interested in her discussion of her life as an artist and seeing some of her early sketches of her son.

And I liked hearing about her research and her relationship with her husband Alistair Dunnett, who at one time was the editor of The Scotsman. Although she talked about living to be 150, she died much too young at the age of 78, in 2001.

Japan

2011-03-14T20:00:00.001-05:00

Like most of the world I’ve been following what has been going on in Japan. I don’t really have anything profound to say about it. It’s hard to have words for such a disaster. A 9.0 earthquake seems bad enough, the Tsunami is like a bad dream on top of it. But now the nuclear crisis?

I’ve really avoided watching much television footage. I don’t want to become numb to the images from seeing them over and over. Because seeing the images isn’t the same thing as being there and knowing that people you know and, maybe love, are gone forever and worrying about the basics of survival and hoping that, on top of everything, there isn’t a nuclear disaster.

So, like the rest of the world, I will only send thoughts and prayers to and for the Japanese people.

6th Grade Math

2011-03-11T22:47:00.002-06:00

I was watching a video from TED this week from the Bill Gates’ TED conference on education that featured a guy I had never heard of -- Salmon Khan.

Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)-- a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It now consists of self-paced software and, with over 1 million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the Internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date). All 2000+ video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman.
Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and had also worked in technology and venture capital. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.

Remember this guy. I think a lot of people are going to be talking about him after this TED talk.

Khan’s “pioneering” idea is to use technology to humanize the classroom and help students learned at their own pace. Especially math.

It brought back memories of 6th grade math for me. Sixth grade was the only year I ever liked math. My teacher was Sr. Katherine, a School Sister of Notre Dame, who was fairly young. I went to school in the 60’s and early 70’s. Programmed, individualized learning was all the rage. In 6th grade we learned many things but the big things we were supposed to master were fractions and decimals/percentages. And I did! I’m still fairly good at fractions and percentages and it is all due to 6th grade math.

We had 42 kids in our classroom. I don’t mean we had 42 kids in my class; we had about 84 kids in my class. The class was divided into two classrooms and we had 42 kids to a room every year I was in grade school – from 1st grade through 8th grade.

42 kids in a classroom is really not conducive to instruction. It helped that we had nuns who ruled with an iron fist but even nuns couldn’t create extra minutes in an hour.

Sr. Katherine, like other teachers, tried to work around this problem by setting up programmed learning so that kids learned how to teach themselves and she could spend her time with kids who needed extra help. She set up a system where we learned “packets” of information. (She didn’t make it up, packets were used a lot back then.)

In class the student would worked through a packet by herself. The student had background/explanatory readings, exercises, and a test to take. You practiced until you were ready to take the test. If you passed, you moved on to the next packet. If you didn’t, you had additional packet material you worked through. You couldn’t move on to the next packet until you mastered the packet your were working on and had a grade that showed mastery. If you failed a packet more than twice you had to go to “class” which was over in one side of the classroom and involved Sr. Katherine going over the material with you and other students who were working at your pace.

It was great. I’m a self-motivator and I could go over things until I learned them and then take the test. I really nailed fractions and percents. That was the only time in my life I ever liked taking math because it was the only time I felt like I really learned what I was supposed to learn AND there was no one looking over my shoulder judging me on how fast or how slow I was learning it.

I even used to stay after school a few days a week and work on packets. Sr. Katherine, being a nun, had no life of her own. She lived in the convent across the street and of course she could work in the classroom until 4:30 every day so kids who needed extra help or who had detention could be there with her. That was the year my mom was in the hospital for a while and I didn’t like to go home anyway. So I voluntarily stayed after school a lot, either for sports practice or to practice math.

By the way, if you were a kid who needed extra help it didn’t mean you were slow. It meant you had simply reached a point where you could no longer teach it to yourself – it might mean you were far in advance of the rest of the class. So it was a unifying experience for our class because at any given time there were kids working together after school who learned at entirely different paces.

In 7th grade I arrived to find that Sr. Katherine had been transferred to another school. We were back to learning math the same old way. I was back to not liking math.

Watching Khan’s video, which features 5th graders, I was reminded of 6th grade. He has basically come up with a computerized version of Sr. Katherine’s class. Good for him! It sounds exciting to me. A global, one world classroom. Not a student-to-teacher ratio but a student-to-valuable-teacher-time ratio. A great blend of computer technology and real human contact.

St. Louis During the Civil War

2011-03-10T21:57:00.001-06:00

Readers might remember my previous post explaining that St. Louis lost control of its police department during the Civil War and the State of Missouri has yet to give it back.

The Opinionator Blog at the New York Times, which is blogging the Civil War, recently published an interesting piece by Adam Arenson about St. Louis and the Rise of the West during the Civil War (reg. req.).

… in November 1860, the northern free states voted for Abraham Lincoln, most slave states voted for John Breckinridge and three Upper South states voted for John Bell, Missouri was the only state to vote for the Northern Democrat, Stephen Douglas. The results in St. Louis were even more unusual: Lincoln edged out Douglas in a four-way race that — unlike any other that day — mirrored the returns of the country as a whole. St. Louis became the only large city in a slave state won by the president-elect, defying regional stereotypes. And Missouri stayed true to form on March 9, 1861, when its secession convention became the first such meeting to vote for staying in the Union.

Aronsen argues that we should not only think of the Civil War as a struggle between North and South to control the West (slave or free) but also a struggle between East and West. St. Louis represented the West.

[Missouri] wasn’t a Southern state or a Northern state, but a Western state. The same goes for St. Louis: a city founded by the French, governed by the Spanish and sold to the Americans, a borderland city that was the hub of western movement across the continent. It was a moderate city with a Republican Party leadership in a slave state led by a secessionist governor. It was an ideal place to view America changing — and the see the power of the West at play in the secession crisis.

I can imagine that the people of St. Louis in the 1860’s were tired of being a place to “view America changing” because St. Louis is still a place to “view America changing” as we watch our state actions today.

On Monday, St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan renewed his tongue in cheek call for St. Louis to secede from Missouri and join Illinois as West East St. Louis.

Enough of this. Why pretend our relationship is worth saving?
Besides, many of us in West East St. Louis have seen enough of this legislative session to know we want out. The legislators in Jefferson City want to repeal child labor laws, lift the restrictions on puppy mills, do away with the voter-approved cost of living increases to the minimum wage and kill unions. Oh yeah, slap teachers around, too. Edge-ee-cay-shun? Who needs it? We'll take those lazy little tykes out of the classroom and put them to work where they belong …
It is really just a matter of dividing the assets.
We'll take urban street crime. They can have the meth labs.

Sigh. Compare that to the State of Illinois which just eliminated the death penalty. There are days that I think secession sounds like a good idea. And then we could even get back our police force:

Certain issues will solve themselves. Local control of the St. Louis Police Department, for instance. Springfield won't want it. They even let Chicago mismanage its own police department.

I’m ready to sign on. Or maybe I should just sell my house and move across The River.

The UnBEARable Liteness of Blogging

2011-03-09T20:20:00.001-06:00

via law professor Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy, I found this delightful little blog post comparing English Bears and American Bears.

Bear with me as I take a bearly deserved break from serious blogging.

On the English side, we have one of my favorites, Winnie-the-Pooh.

Pooh is first presented as highly imaginative, if somewhat absent-minded. In the first story he tries to fool a hive of bees by disguising himself as a small black cloud in the sky. But he is worried that he still looks like a bear covered in mud and holding a blue balloon, so he asks Christopher Robin to help by holding an umbrella. "Well, you laughed to yourself, 'Silly old Bear!'" says the narrator, addressing Christopher Robin, "but you didn't say it aloud because you were so fond of him."
Soon, however, Christopher Robin loses any reservations about calling Pooh a silly old bear. Sadly, Pooh internalizes the characterization. Their eventual dynamic is summarized when Christopher Robin is dragging him down the stairs by one paw …

hmmm. I can bearly bear to think of pooh bear being abused. Silly old bear.

On the other hand, are American Bears really more more assertive and autonomous than English bears? Or just more brazen? Here’s one of my favorite American bears:

Also (overly?) self-confident is the muppet Fozzie Bear, who is pursuing a career as a stand-up comedian, despite the fact that people often throw rotten tomatoes at him.

Fozzie gets by with the bear minimun of talent,

I think I agree with Ilya Somin, who says: “The definitive study of Anglo-American literary bears remains to be written, even as its absence gets ever more unbearable.”

And here’s a little music to make your day more bearable:

… in which I discuss e-Reading and my iPad

2011-03-08T20:59:00.001-06:00

So, last July I caved to my consumerist half and bought an iPad even though I couldn’t think why I needed one. I’m still not sure I need it but I do like it.

I never intended that my primary purpose would be to read e-books and so far I really haven’t used it that way. Way back when I bought my iPhone I had downloaded the Stanza app to try it out. I can’t remember if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came with it or I downloaded it for free just to try the app out. I know I downloaded Death Comes for the Archbishop. I had never read it and I figured I would try out the app using a free book. I assumed I would use it when I was unexpectedly waiting somewhere and didn’t have a book with me.

It is still unread. Reading on a small device just never appealed to me so I never pulled it out and tried it. If I do pull out my iPhone I use it for my Google Reader or for Twitter.

When the Kindle app came out for iPhone I didn’t have any desire to try it. Two of my colleagues at work use it all the time and tell me they have read lots of books on their iPhones. But, the thing is, I’m seldom caught somewhere without a book and the idea of reading something on such a small screen just doesn’t appeal to me. I figured that if I ever bought a Kindle I might eventually download the app. But until then I didn’t see a need to have it.

When I bought the iPad I decided to try out the iBooks app. It came already loaded with AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. I immediately read it and was amazed at how they had recreated the look of the original book on screen. It was as if I was looking at pictures of the original pages of the book book, complete with the Ernest H. Shepard illustrations. If I had children I wouldn’t hesitate to download picture books at a moments’ notice to keep them occupied if we were somewhere without a book.

But I was less sure about reading an adult book. I like the feel of books in my hand. Last August I intended to join an internet read-along of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I had never read it and always felt that I should (note that I didn’t say I’d always wanted to read it). I figured a reading group led by someone familiar with the book was the way to go. I think I envisioned it being like the 2666 reading group I joined last year. We had a weekly assignment and it took a few months to finish. It was hard to fall behind. Well, this group worked differently and they moved along at a quite a clip, finishing the book in a few weeks. I was on vacation when they started so I started out behind and I didn’t even own the book yet!

To try to catch up I downloaded it onto my iBooks app (it is of course free) and started reading. After a few days I found that I didn’t have enough time to keep up with the reading group and I dropped out. But for the week that I tried to catch up, I read the e-version of Ulysses.

Let me start by saying that this probably wasn’t the best book to start with. One of the things I found difficult was not knowing where I was in relation to the end of the book. I like being able to see how much of the book is left. I like to flip forward and see where the end of the chapter is and tell myself that I can certainly finish it in an hour or so.

Ulysses doesn’t have chapters. And there are multiple editions of the book so when the assignment was to read specific pages the leader would try to give a general description of what those pages encompassed so that those reading other editions would know where to end. Trying this on an e-reader just frustrated me.

Ok, I admit that I’m somewhat obsessive compulsive about “time” but that’s the way I am. And it drove me crazy not being able to estimate how much time it would take me to read the next assigned installment. After two days I went out and bought a paperback. (And then, as I say, I gave up due to lack of time.)

And that was pretty much it for the iBooks app for me. I downloaded the US Constitution for free – because you never know these days when you might need to prove that something is actually in the Constitution. But I didn’t feel like reading any more books on it.

Then, in October, I decided to rejoin one of my reading groups on a casual basis. I decided that I wasn’t going to get all worked up about making sure I had read each and every book. After all, no one else did. But I fully intended to read the first book to be discussed when I went back. The book they had chosen was a non-fiction book called The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Collett.

Since this was a snap decision I headed over to Barnes and Noble to pick up the book with only three days to read it. I couldn’t find it anywhere so I finally asked at the information desk and the clerk told me that they didn’t have it at that store but he’d check other stores. After a few moments he regretfully told me that no other store had it in stock but I could certainly order it. As I started to tell him that I didn’t have time to order it, he said “or it is available as an e-book.”

I thought about it. I of course didn’t have a NOOK and had no intention of buying one but I did have an iPad and I knew I could download the Kindle app or the NOOK app. So I decided to try it (since that was really the only choice I had other than not reading the book). I don’t really like Amazon and I order from Barnesandnoble.com all the time, so I went with the NOOK app and downloaded it. And got it read before the meeting that week. On the whole I would rather have read the hard version of it, but since it wasn’t a book I would have ever wanted to read again, and it wasn’t a book I could imagine giving to any person that I know, it was perfectly fine for the circumstances. More about the experience later in this post.

Then a few weeks later I went to Florida. On the day I was leaving to come back I realized that I had finished the book I had brought with me and I needed something to read. I knew I could pick something up at the airport bookseller but I had really been wanting to re-read some Sherlock Holmes after watching the new BBC series. So I decided to download it. And this time I decided to use the iBook app to give it another try. (The iBook store doesn’t have nearly as many titles as Barnes and Noble but I figured even they would have Sherlock Holmes.) It was easy to find and download and I read a lot of it on the plane. But, on the whole, I would rather have been reading the hard version of it.

Then, a couple of months ago I watched a TED presentation by Brene Brown that I really enjoyed and on the spur of the moment I decided to read her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You are Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. I’m not really into self-help or pop psychology books but I enjoyed her talk so much that I wanted to give her a try. I also wanted to read it right then when the urge was upon me so I downloaded it into my NOOK app and started reading. Except for one small factor that I will get to later, I was perfectly content to read it as an e-book. It had easy chapters, so I didn’t start to sweat the whole “time” factor. On the whole, except for one small thing that didn’t matter much, I was content to read it as an e-book.

Then, a few weeks later, I realized that there was another meeting of my reading group and I hadn’t read the book. I didn’t really care except that it had been a book that I had wanted to read: A Short History of Women: A Novel, by Kate Walbert. That month’s meeting was the celebratory post-holiday Tea that we have on a Saturday afternoon. It is intended to be a festive occasion and usually we watch a movie instead of reading a book. I don’t know why we picked a book this time. I suspected that many people wouldn’t have read the book and those that did wouldn’t talk about it much. So I really felt no pressure to read it.

But I also suspected that if I didn’t read it now I would never get back to it. So, since I got home at a reasonable time on Friday evening with a few hours left before I would go to sleep, I decided to download it for the NOOK and see if I could read a few chapters and decide if I’d want to finish it the following week. I read it all in one sitting.

It wasn’t very long, less than 200 pages. It had easily defined chapters. I liked the writing style, I liked the story. It wasn’t the best novel I’ve read in my life but it was very enjoyable. On the whole I probably would have preferred reading it in paperback. I could definitely imagine passing it on to other people I know who would enjoy it and that’s a problem with e-books. But I was really glad that I could download it at 9:00 on a Friday night when the urge hit me.

So I’ve moved from not expecting to read on the iPad to expecting that I will read some things on the iPad, particularly things that I want to read on the spur of the moment. But I also anticipate that I will continue to do my normal reading in real books because I really like real books. And also because the e-reader is not perfect and I’ve found an annoying problem in a couple of the books I read – both of the non-fiction books.

Non-fiction books tend to have footnotes. The NOOK app seems to be set up so that you can click the footnote and it will take you back to the note (in this case really an end note) where you can read it and then click the number again and it will take you back to where you were. That is a great idea but it didn’t work. It didn’t work in either book, but especially in Brene Brown’s book. The footnote numbering was completely off and always took me to the very first footnote and then took me BACK to where the very first footnote occurred. I eventually gave up and figured I’d read them at the end (and her footnotes weren’t full of interesting asides anyway so it was only a minor annoyance).

I suspect that most books that I’m going to want to read on the spur of the moment are going to be non-fiction. I only choose fiction on the spur of the moment if I’m in an airport. And usually I’m more organized in buying reading book groups so I don’t need to buy them on the spur of the moment. The rest of the time, I make lists of things I want to eventually read and I eventually get to them. But non-fiction, for some reason, I often look for on the spur of the moment. I usually do it on the Barnes and Noble site and have them sent to my office and then I read them as SOON as I get home. A lot of the non-fiction I read has to do with French Colonial times and the fur trade, so there’s a method to my reading. And the footnotes are important to me, sometimes more important than the book itself. So if footnotes aren’t going to work well that will be a big problem. I assume, however, that as ebooks become more ubiquitous they will fix that problem

The Elizabeth Marsh also had a problem with illustrations. As is typical with many biographies, the author had a couple of sections inserted into the book that contained a series of pictures – in this case reproductions of paintings of places and of people who were mentioned in the biography. The pictures had captions identifying them (as you might expect). The e-book version of the book made the pictures impossible to follow. Each picture was put on a different page although I think the “real” book might have multiple pictures on one page. Then the captions in the e-book often ended up on a different page from the picture. It was quite annoying. And there was no easy way to make reference to the pictures – to “flip back and forth” as you were reading as you could do in a “real” book. It was a real flaw in the e-book version.

So there are a few glitches to work out. I suspect the fiction books work better because they are more profitable. In A Short History of Women I was concerned because there was a family tree at the beginning that I just knew I was going to need to consult fairly often. But it turned out that the ebook was set up to very easily “flip” back and forth almost like you would do in a real book. So where they have a financial incentive they take the care to make the ebooks work. Eventually all books will work.

As I said, I doubt I’ll read many books on the iPad. I mostly use it for my RSS feed (I use Reeder and I love it, I now find it hard to use plain old Google Reader) and my Twitter account. The TED app is great. ABC TV has a great app. I wish hulu had a free app but they only have the paid service so I still watch hulu on my laptop. But I watch streaming Netflix on my iPad. I love real solitaire. And I love the Words with Friends app. And there are a bunch of other apps that I use occasionally but not regularly. On the whole I like it. But it’s a toy, not a necessity.

A toy that I’m glad I have.

My Reading Life: The Reading Memoir

2011-03-07T21:55:00.001-06:00

[Note: This is adapted from something I wrote for for another venue.]

There was a time when I was hooked on memoirs about reading. Maybe it was just that there were a lot of Reading Memoirs being published. The title of this post comes from Pat Conroy’s book My Reading Life. I’m not a big Pat Conroy fan but I could relate to this:

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. Let me call on the spirit of Anna Karenina as she steps out onto the train tracks of Moscow in the last minute of her glorious and implacable life. Let me beckon Madame Bovary to issue me a cursory note of warning whenever I get suicidal or despairing as I live out a life too sad by half. If I close my eyes I can conjure up a whole country of the dead who will live for all time because writers turned them into living flesh and blood. There is Jay Gatsby floating face downward in his swimming pool or Tom Robinson's bullet riddled body cut down in his Alabama prison yard in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yes, all of those same characters are very vivid in my mind. Except maybe Jay Gatsby. He is always a blur to me. Tom seems more vivid.

Or how about Anna Quindlen’s memoir How Reading Changed my Life in which she writes: "There was waking and there was sleeping. And then there were books". In my case there were books when I was supposed to be sleeping.

My own personal favorite book of this genre is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’ Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books in which she asks, “Without books how could I have become myself?"

There were some books I wanted to possess even more intimately than by reading. I would clutch them to my heart and long to break through the chest wall, making them part of me, or else press my body into them, to burrow between the pages. When I was eight I felt this passion – androgynous, seeking both to penetrate and encompass – for Little Women which I had read several times. Frustrated, I began copying it into a notebook. With the first few pages I felt delirious, but the project quickly palled. It was just words, the same words I had read over and over; writing them down did not bring them into closer possession. Only later did I understand that I wanted to have written Little Women, conceived and gestated it and felt its words delivered from my pen.

Then in the 1990’s I got hooked on the book club memoir. One of my favorites was The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley. In 1991 Paula Huntley’s husband answered the call of the American Bar Association to help Kosovo build a modern legal system and Paula went with him. I remember reading about the project in the ABA Journal and wondering what type of person would volunteer. It sounded like a project that needed people braver than me.

Ed has taken unpaid leave from the law school to work pro bono in the Balkans and I've resigned from my marketing job of twelve years. We will have no income for a year, but we've decided to make the commitment. The only worry that really remains tonight is whether I can do anything useful for the Kosovars. I don't want to be a voyeur in a country that has suffered so much. Ed will be helping to create a modern legal system with the American Bar Association's Central and Eastern European Law Initiative (ABA-CEELI). But I have no legal training, no medical or counseling skills. And there is certainly no need in Kosovo at this stage for my marketing experience.

Paula became an ESL teacher and taught, among other things, Ernest Hemingway to her Kosovo adult students. But they taught her much in return. After reading this book I went out and bought multiple copies and gave them out to people I knew. I kept a copy in my guest bedroom on the nightstand for a long time, although I see now that it is gone. Good! I hope a guest passed it on after reading it.

Another great memoir about a group reading experience (among other things) is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. She writes:

For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.
The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality. We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights, along with Western classics-Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean's December and, yes, Lolita. As I write the title of each book, memories whirl in with the wind to disturb the quiet of this fall day in another room in another country.

Most of us don’t have such exotic stories to tell about the venues in which we read books that we loved. My own reading takes place in snatches these days and there is no sense of danger in my reading group meetings. It has been a while since I’ve picked up a Memoir about Reading. Are there any good ones I’ve missed?

Hello Again

2011-03-05T11:56:00.001-06:00

As you could probably tell last weekend, I finally got my laptop back. All fixed so no excuse to buy a new MacBook Pro. Although who knows, sometimes I buy things I don’t need. Like when I bought my iPad last July.

Whenever people ask me if I like my iPad I always say that “I love it, but I still can’t figure out why I NEED it.” After spending two weeks at home with just the iPad I still don’t think I need it more than I need a laptop. But it did come in handy. It would have been harder to keep up with online life with just my iPhone. Maybe I’ll write an entire post about the iPad now that I’ve had it more than 6 months.

It turned out that it was easy to fix my little HP laptop, but it took longer than expected because every time they would order the new RAM I needed it would come in for a desktop and not a laptop. Finally they went to a different supplier. The guys at Clayton Computers on Big Bend were great though, and I recommend them. I always knew my laptop ran hot (apparently all HP computers run hot). What happened was that all the soldering around the RAM drive (is that what you call it?) melted. Yes, MELTED. Pretty scary huh?

So eventually they called me and told me that if I wanted to pick it up with lesser RAM and use it until they got in the correct additional RAM, I could. I took them up on that offer, since it had been a couple of weeks (partly my fault because it took me six days to get around to taking it in). Boy was I glad I picked it up when I did because three days later we had a Big Storm with Straight Line Winds and it hit the block where my laptop would have been sitting on the shelf waiting for final repair. It would have taken another week to get it. It was a mess there.

The telephone and power line poles snapped off at the top and streets had to be blocked off. When I stopped by yesterday to have the new RAM popped in, I pulled around to the back of the building and my mouth dropped open. The apartment buildings behind looked like the roofs had just been ripped off. Trees had been knocked down and back porches were destroyed from where the roof had come down. Mother Nature can be scary.

Anyway, my little laptop is safe and sound and worked fine for blogging this week. But after more than 2 weeks using my iPad exclusively I decided that I should take some time to reorganize my online life. The iPad works a bit slower than a laptop and I began to notice things I didn’t notice on my laptop. I noticed that I have a lot of RSS feeds that I don’t read at once and I mark as read fully intending to go back and read later but I never actually do. On the laptop, skipping over things is quick. On the iPad, every refresh takes a bit of time (like on an iPhone).

When I woke up this morning and saw that it was a gray, gloomy day I decided it was a good day to organize. So while I was doing laundry (don’t you love laundry? You can do a major chore through which most of the time you are doing nothing) I went through and reorganized all my RSS feeds. I moved most of the book blog feeds out of RSS and back into a separate Book Blog Roll here at the blog. I think I’ll be more likely to read them at leisure that way. My books folder in Google Reader was getting unwieldy so this should help. Sometimes my heart would sink when I’d check my Reader and find 45 book posts ALONE unread. So now my Reader only has professional book review sites like the NYTimes and the LATimes etc. They get clogged on weekends but that’s ok – I have time to read them on weekends.

I also added a link to Readers and Book Lovers at DailyKos (the Great Orange Satan – if you are conservative you will not want to click that link). Markos recently upgraded the entire site and now users have the ability to create separate Groups for non-political topics. For the last two years almost my entire participation there was in the book diaries so I was happy to see a Readers and Book Lovers Group. It has people who write for the Group and also republishes book/reading/writing related diaries that other people at the site write. The nice thing is that you can ignore everything but the Groups you follow if you want to. And as I’ve found over the last two years, the people who inhabit the book threads are very nice. So click the link and check it out if you are so inclined. For those of you who are dKos members, click the little heart next to the word “follow” and all the diaries from that Group will show up in your “stream” (another new dKos concept which is the best thing they’ve done in years).

On my own reading front, things have been a bit sparce. I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction this year and while I enjoy it I don’t necessarily want to write about it. And a lot of it is history that is connected to the genealogy work I’m interested in. I did read Laurence Cosse’s A Novel Bookstore last week and didn’t much like it. I didn’t buy the premise and the writing seemed stilted which may have been the fault of the translator. But there was far too much telling and not enough showing for my taste. I also picked up The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, which won this year’s Booker Prize, but so far I haven’t started it. I’m still working on Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, which I’ve been slowly reading since Christmas. I’m almost finished but I like to savor it. And I have Patti Smith’s memoir sitting there too, unstarted. And I got stalled on Alan Taylor’s Divided Ground because I was so angry at how the Indians were treated that I decided to take a break. But I keep thinking about it so I’ll probably get back to it this week.

On the TV front, I’m still watching Castle on Monday Nights. I catch up with Glee on Hulu when I can. I like that Friday night series Who do you Think You Are although I have to laugh at how easy they make genealogy seem. I have to catch up on a few weeks of Bones and Fringe. But that’s it.

I feel like I just finished writing a Holiday Letter that only goes out once a year. But it feels a very long time since I’ve been here. Hopefully that will change.

Looking for American History

2011-02-25T22:18:00.001-06:00

“… not all of colonial America was English.”

Matt Yglesias has recently taken to publishing excerpts from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America. I don’t know if he is currently reading it for the first time or he simply found his old edition on a bookshelf and decided to use excerpts in his blog. If you haven’t read it, and you are interested in American history, you should pick up a copy. It is well worth your time.

Alan Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 book William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. I’ve never had the opportunity to read that history of the father of James Fennimore Cooper and I did not notice when it won the Pulitzer Prize. Alan Taylor was not on my radar the day I was wandering through the history section of Barnes and Noble, looking for a history of North America that wasn’t exclusively an English history.

For reasons too complicated to explain, back around 2003 I found myself needing to learn more about the history of the British West Indies, the German migration to Pennsylvania in the early 1700’s and the colonization of Canada by the French. I wasn’t sure exactly how much I needed to know and, while I was prepared to start checking books out of the library, I wasn’t sure where to start. What I needed was the view from 20,000 feet, a general history of North America that covered all of these geographic areas. Then I could decide exactly where I would zoom in on.

My local library branch didn’t have one on its shelves that fit my needs. The available books were almost completely centered on the 13 colonies, throwing in mentions of Spanish conquistadors and Marquette/Joliet’s exploration of the Mississippi. There was almost nothing about the West Indies.

Of course I had access to the entire library system through the card catalog. But perusing a card catalog is just not the same as paging through actual books to see if they meet your needs. So I headed to Barnes and Noble sure that it was a waste of time but fully intending to console myself by buying a new novel while I was there.

I wandered through the history section and finally picked up a paperback copy of Alan Taylor’s 2001 book, American Colonies. I skimmed the introduction:

By long convention, “American history” began in the east in the English colonies and spread slowly westward, reaching only the Appalachian Mountains by the end of the colonial period. According to this view, the “seeds” of the United States first appeared with the English colonists in 1607 in Jamestown in Virginia, followed in 1620 by “the Pilgrims” at Plymouth in New England. Earlier Spanish and contemporary French settlements were fundamentally irrelevant except as enemies, as “foreign” challenges that brought out the best in the English as they made themselves into Americans. What we now call “the West” did not become part of American history until the United States invaded it during the early nineteenth century. Alaska and Hawaii made no appearance in national history until the end of that century.

I thought that pretty much summed up history as I had learned it. But, said Taylor, “the traditional story of American uplift excludes too many people.”

As I thumbed through the book I realized that it was exactly what I needed. He said:

Striking a balance between the emerging power of British America and the enduring diversity of the colonial peoples requires bending (but not breaking) the geographic boundaries suggested by the United States today. Hispanic Mexico, the British West Indies, and French Canada receive more detailed coverage than is customary in a “colonial American history” (which has meant the history of the proto-United States). All three were powerful nodes of colonization that affected the colonists and Indians living between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. The internal cultures, societies, and economies of the Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies also warrant attention lest they again appear only in wars, reduced to bellicose foils to British protagonists. Such internal description also affords the comparative perspective needed to see the distinctive nature of British colonial society that made a colonial revolution for independence and republicanism possible first on the Atlantic seaboard.

I bought it on the spot. I read it. And I regularly go back to it when I need an overview of a certain geographic location at a certain time. I have blogged about how Winnie the Pooh is a “book of my life” because it affected what I expected from a well written story. American Colonies is a “book of my life” because it changed how I looked at the history of this country.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Encounters”, gives a general overview of the pre-European continent and discusses New Spain, the Spanish Frontier and Canada/Iroquoia. It takes us up to the mid 1650’s. It is not until Part II, “Colonies”, that we truly meet the British, beginning with the colonization of Virginia and continuing through the colonization of the Chesapeake Colonies, New England, Carolina and the Middle Colonies. There is a chapter about Puritans and Indians and a whole chapter about the West Indies. Part III is called “Empires” and it takes us from about 1650 all the way to the Pacific colonization in 1820. It includes good descriptions of French America and has a nice section on the German migration to Pennsylvania.

If you want a broad perspective on colonial North America, this is the book for you. For instance, often the importance of the West Indies in colonial life is overlooked other than noting that it was part of the “triangle trade” in slaves. Taylor spends time on their importance in the British economy. Thus we understand why, when negotiating the peace treaty after the Seven Years War, the British, who had conquered Canada and the French West Indies, considered “keeping most of the French West Indies and returning Canada.”

Although much smaller, the sugar islands were far more lucrative. But the influential British West Indian lobby did not want to weaken its advantageous position within the empire by accepting new competition from the more productive plantations on Guadeloupe and Martinique. The British West Indians lobbied to keep Canada instead. … By taking vast new territories in the Treaty of Paris, the British broke with a previous imperial policy that had sought to maximize maritime commerce while minimizing continental entanglements. Somehow they would have to raise the money to administer and garrison their expensive new domains in Canada, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and Florida.

My copy is well used at this point. And over the years, as I’ve sought out books about specific peoples, places and periods, I’ve never had reason to think that Taylor got anything wrong in his overview.

Taylor has a new book out, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies. It is on my to-be-read list, but first I must finish his 2007 book The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. It has been sitting on my shelf for a few years but I finally picked it up this month and am engrossed in it.

But for all around usefulness, and sheer readability, American Colonies can’t be beat and I recommend it.

The Man

2011-02-14T22:54:00.000-06:00

On Tuesday, February 15, 2011 the President will give Stan Musial the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country.

3,630 hits
1,949 runs scored
1,951 RBIs
Led National League in total bases for 6 years
7 National League Batting Titles
MVP 1943, 1946, 1948
Lifetime Batting Average: .331

Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969

But most important, he is just an all around good guy.

Laptop Problems

2011-02-08T19:21:00.000-06:00

Well, my laptop decided to melt down or something so I'm writing this on my iPad. But even though I like my iPad, it isn't great for CREATING things. It's mostly good for consuming.

So posting will be even lighter than usual for a while.

History is Written by the Victors

2011-02-03T21:24:00.001-06:00

On days when I’m disgusted by the avarice, greed, narcissism and selfishness of my fellow Americans I like to remind myself things aren’t worse today than they’ve ever been. America was born out of selfishness and greed. But they won’t teach you that in schools.

I’m reading Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution and was reminded of this again. I was also reminded of an online discussion I had a few years ago about a line in the Declaration of Independence accusing King George of “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” Most Americans don’t know that this refers to the Quebec Act, adopted by Parliament in 1774. It was meant to resolve the tensions that arose from the British conquest of French North America and help integrate the French Canadians into the British empire.

Taylor explains:

To please the French Canadians, Parliament endorsed French civil law, protected the Catholic faith, and mandated a provincial government that combined a military governor with an oligarchical council (and without an elected assembly).

The American colonists were not pleased by this. Even at this pre-Republic stage in their development the Americans believed that they should be telling people how to live their lives and of course they believed that their way was the best way. Never mind that the British government had given serious thought as to the best way to integrate Canada into the empire, the American colonists were sure that Parliament was wrong and they were right. Or maybe they just didn’t care about whether the French Canadians were integrated. After all, they were French.

But the thing that really drove the Americans crazy about the Quebec Act was that it was also intended to protect the rights of the Indians to their lands. It was a double whammy for the Americans – protecting red skinned people from grasping American land speculators through a plan that also helped people who spoke French. See? Things never really change.

In 1768 Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in North America, had convinced Parliament to create an imaginary line past which settlement would not go. This would preserve the Indian lands for the Indians, which the British merchants understood was essential to preserving the Fur Trade. This line cut off the Ohio River Valley from land speculators. The Quebec Act reinforced this concept by taking away from the colonies any hope of ever controlling the Ohio River Valley because they gave it to Quebec.

Again, Taylor:

The Quebec Act also offended Patriot leaders by extending Quebec’s boundaries south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi, subsuming a vast Indian country coveted by speculators and settlers. An exasperated Parliament sought to restrain the intruding frontiersmen who provoked so much trouble with the Indians. Governed by the military without an elected assembly, Quebec might protect Indians better than Virginia or Pennsylvania ever had. In effect, the British expanded Quebec to bolster the boundary for the Indian Country that Sir William had negotiated at Fort Stanwix in 1768. But that expansion alienated powerful colonial politicians who doubled as land speculators, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

Yes, the Americans were very unhappy with these new rules and like all Americans who followed them, they simply ignored anything that didn’t fit into their world view. The Virginians especially. They entered the Ohio River Valley illegally and provoked conflicts with the Indians there. In fact, things seemed to be heading toward an all out Indian War when Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in North America, suddenly died. As with most important points in history, timing is everything and Johnson had very bad timing. At the time of his death he was working with the Mohawks to use their influence to end the Ohio River conflict while he worked the colonial side. It is unlikely that this plan would have succeeded, but we’ll never know for sure.

But other things were happening that also affected the Ohio conflicts.

With the empire in crisis, the timing of Johnson’s death rendered the blow especially ominous. General Thomas Gage reported: “I should at all times consider this event as a Publick Loss. I look upon it as a heavy one at this Juncture, when the frontier People, of Virginia particularly, have taken so much Pains to bring on an Indian War.” Gage also confronted a virtual collapse of British authority in the colonial seaports, where radical leaders resisted British taxes. Infuriated by that resistance, Parliament and the Crown resolved to punish Boston by enforcing a blockade with occupying troops commanded by Gage. That shift withdrew British troops from the troubled frontier in western Pennsylvania, which Indians and settles then drenched in blood.

While I had always known that the American Revolution was not a good thing, in general, for the American Indians I had never before realized that the insurrection in Massachusetts forced the British to withdraw troops from the west who were there to protect the Indians and their land. If I had thought about it, I might have rationally come to the conclusion that this was inevitable. But I’d never thought about it.

Over the last few years I’ve read a lot of colonial history and I’ve discovered that I don’t really care for the American colonists all that much. On some levels they were admirable but on other levels they were abominable. And, as I continue to read Taylor’s book I find myself wondering what life would have been like if the 13 colonies had lost and the founding fathers had all been hung.

Snow Day / Reading Day!

2011-02-01T16:15:00.001-06:00

I can’t believe how long it has been since I updated this blog. But today I’m stuck at home in the midst of a snowpocalypse and started thinking about what I’ve been reading lately. So here is a recap:

Tinkers by Paul Harding. This small novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. I started it last September, taking it along to read in the waiting room on the day I went to get my yearly mammogram. When I discovered it was about a man who is dying, I decided it wasn’t something I really wanted to read at a cancer screening center so I put it aside. I didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks ago and found myself reading it with the sole purpose of finishing it. ‘nuff said?

The Gifts of Imperfection: Letting go of who you think you’re Supposed to be and embrace who you are, by Brene Brown. I’m not much into self-help books and this one, I know, reeks of self-helpism. But Brene Brown gave a lovely speech at TED about her struggle to understand that vulnerability is essential for wholehearted living and I thought “I’d like to read one of her books!”. So I did. And for what it is I really enjoyed it. It isn’t a self-help book in the sense that it doesn’t tell the reader to do any one thing, she talks much about her own struggle to realize her authentic self.

"I try to make authenticity my number one goal when I go into a situation where I'm feeling vulnerable. If authenticity is my goal and I keep it real, I never regret it. I might get my feelings hurt, but I rarely feel shame. When acceptance or approval becomes my goal, and it doesn't work out, that can trigger shame for me: "I'm not good enough. If the goal is authenticity and they don't like me, I'm okay. If the goal is being liked and they don't like me, I'm in trouble. I get going by making authenticity the priority."

As someone who has had lifelong struggles with self-esteem, I found many of her ideas very useful.

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. I enjoyed this story of multi-generations of women, most of whom are confusingly named Dorothy. The first Dorothy starved herself to death in the fight to give women the vote in Britain. A later Dorothy engages in civil disobedience in modern day Delaware. All of the women are trying to find their own place in their worlds. Walbert crammed a lot of ideas in a small book in which the story is not told chronologically but moves back and forth between the generations.

The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. Joe left his hometown behind, shook the dust off his feet and wrote a best-selling novel based on fictitious versions of town characters which was made into a moderately successful movie (starring Leo DiCaprio). But now Joe’s father is dying and he must return and face the wrath of the townspeople who feel ill-used. It is a good premise. Reviews said it was funny. My book group agreed that was false advertising. We thought it was sad and we thought Joe was an asshole, In fact, Joe agrees that he is an asshole. But you know what? Admitting that you are an asshole doesn’t really make you NOT an asshole. I suspect that men would like this book more than women.

I’m currently working on Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution and Patti Smith’s Just Kids.

Cahokia Mounds

2011-01-14T20:03:00.001-06:00

As I’ve written about before, the east and west sides of the Mississippi River at St. Louis used to be the site of many Indian mounds:

Across the river from St. Louis is the interpretive center for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site where archaeologists have spent years investigating the culture of the long lost Mississippian mound builders. The mounds were originally on both sides of the river though and were spread throughout the site that is now St. Louis. Over the years they were destroyed as structures in the city were built.

National Geographic has a nice write up about Cahokia this month that’s worth reading.

Everyone agrees that Cahokia developed quickly a couple centuries after corn became an important part of the local diet, that it drew together people from the American Bottom, and that it dwarfed other Mississippian communities in size and scope. The battle lines tend to form along the questions of how populous it was, how centralized its political authority and economic organization were, and the nature and extent of its reach and influence.

The people of Cahokia (we do not even know what they called themselves) were long gone by the time Europeans reached this part of the continent. But for about 300 years they maintained a large, settled community. According to the article, it was hard for Europeans to imagine the “savages” having a city and the whole concept of a city didn’t fit in with Andrew Jackson’s plan to forcibly push the “nomadic” Indians west. But it was there. And archaeologists continue to dig.

I visited the interpretive center a couple of months ago and was quite impressed. I’ve never found time to really write about it but I want to go back again. Especially after reading this article.

Amen

2011-01-12T21:45:00.001-06:00

Reading Digby today, I was reminded of the words of Robert Kennedy, spoken at a time of great national shock and sorrow. Looking at those words again, I find it hard to imagine that he could speak so eloquently and with such kindness and hope, when speaking more or less extemporaneously.

These last few days have reminded me of being a child, when political violence happened regularly. A few years ago, a colleague of mine, who is the same age as me, tried to explain to the “young people” at our office what it was like to be a child in the 60’s like we were. What it was like to assume that anyone who rose in public office was liable to be assassinated. How we simply took it for granted. And how, looking back at that attitude, how crazy it seems today. Hopefully it will not come to that again.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Indianapolis, Indiana
April 4, 1968
This is the text from news release version.
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

What’s the Plural of Prius?

2011-01-11T21:38:00.001-06:00

Yeah, that’s a new Toyota ad campaign. I’m going with Prii (pre aye).

I got myself a Prius last summer and so far I’m loving it. And it doesn’t drive any worse in the snow than my Corolla did. I get great gas mileage (although not as great in the winter as when it was warm). It’s comfortable. I didn’t get all the bells and whistles, just a basic model. The only extra I sometimes wish I’d gotten was the leather heated seats. But I only wish that on really cold days.

There are a few things I would change that all are design flaws but wouldn’t make me not buy the car again. I find it hard to back up straight. I don’t know why (I had a hatchback long ago as my first car and had no problem) but I’m thinking it has to do with the location of the back windshield wiper. It creates a false center for the back window. I’d fix that if it were up to me.

I can’t see the front of the car so I never know if I’m going to run into the wall in the parking garage when I’m parking. I stop right before I’m sure I’m going to run into it. Then find I’m a good foot and a half away. It’s also hard to judge the back of the car, but not as bad as the front.

There’s no place to store change. Truly I find this the most annoying design flaw since my Corolla had at least 3 places to store change, two of which were designed for change. What gives Toyota?

But on the whole I like it.

Now. Sing along … what do you call one when it turns into more …

The Floating Palace: A Duet Performed by The Saint Louis Symphony and Circus Flora

2011-01-09T19:27:00.001-06:00

The Floating Palace was a circus showboat that played up and down the Mississippi River just before the Civil War. It was an extremely elegant barge, pulled by two paddle wheelers with a full circus ring inside.

So it said in the program that I received when I walked into Powell Hall last night. You can’t really go wrong attending The Saint Louis Symphony on a Saturday night and it was a program full of my favorites: parts of Copland’s Rodeo; Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King; a series of pieces from Bizet’s Carmen; and Falla’s Fire Dance among others.

But as we headed down the aisle to find “Orchestra Center, Row F”, we knew it wasn’t going to be the usual “what a great night at the Symphony” kind of night. It was going to be something we had never experienced before.

For one thing, Row F is, as you might imagine, the 6th row at Powell Hall. But not last night. Last night they had removed rows A, B, and C and didn’t sell any seats in rows D and E. So we were, in effect, in the front row. And we were almost directly under the high wire where the Flying Wallendas were going to perform later in the show. That’s right, the Flying Wallendas were going to perform with the Symphony right over our heads. I looked at the woman next to me and she said, “Oh yeah, I’m VERY nervous.” I looked at my sister and she said, “If they drop those pole things, they’ll probably kill us.” I said, “At last we’ll break their fall.”

St. Louis has it’s own local circus company, Circus Flora, that performs each year in a one ring circus tent set up on the parking lot of Powell Hall in June after the Symphony season is over. It’s a lot of fun to go see, a traditional one ring circus where you can almost reach out and touch the performers. The clowns circulate among the audience and you probably could hear the breaths of the performers if the Circus band weren’t playing so loud.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Circus Flora got itself a bigger band. It teamed up with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra to do a circus right there on the stage of Powell Hall. We weren’t sure what to expect. Where was the orchestra (which usually takes up the entire stage) going to sit and where would the Circus performers perform if there was no ring? Well, the Symphony was on raised platforms on the back three quarters of the stage and the Circus used the front quarter of the stage and the space above it and above the first few rows of the audience.

It was a great night, one of the best things I’ve ever seen. First, the Symphony was, as usual, wonderful. I have no idea how guest conductor Alistair Willis got this gig. I searched his bio for any sign that he’d been in a Circus Band in a previous life but, if he had, it was scrubbed from his official history. He seemed to have a good rapport with the Orchestra and they sounded sharp.

The choice of music for each act was usually spot on. Of course, the Symphony is committed to playing the entire piece and, unlike the Circus Band, can’t suddenly end a piece to make the music and the performer end together. But the Circus had made provision for that and had “other” things to go on after the performer ended their spot.

Circus Flora usually puts together a loose narrative that ties together all the acts and last night was no different. The circus performers were on The Floating Palace, performing up and down the Mississippi. One of the performers was pining for a girl he had met in St. Louis. There were three stowaways that made appearances now and then. And of course everyone lived happily ever after. But mostly it was all about the performances.

Where to begin. There was, of course, juggling – performed to Stravinsky’s Circus Polka. There was a duet of two female performers hanging from a big ring usually only by their toes (it seemed) – performed to Copland’s Corral Nocturne from Rodeo. Aerialist Una Mimnagh did a ballet like performance holding onto a rope high above the stage – performed to selections from Falla’s Three Cornered Hat.

There were no horses at this circus, unlike the summer version, but the dog act was back and they are one of my favorites. Johnny Peers & the Muttville Comix performed to selections from Kabelevsky’s The Comedians. Each dog in the large menagerie has been rescued from a pet shelter and none of them match any of the others. But if you’d love to see a Bassett Hound riding a skateboard, this is the act for you.

Another favorite of mine are the St. Louis Arches, who are a young troop of local acrobats. I feel that I’ve seen these kids grow up and every year they get better and better. Last night was the best I’ve ever seen them.

Aleysa Gulevich wowed the audience with hula hoops – performing to music from Bizet’s Carmen. She started with one hula hoop and by the end of her sultry performance she was covered in hula hoops.

Duo Voltart was new to St. Louis, performing here for the first time and they were a wow. Their act, performed to Falla’s Fire Dance, was a combination of dance moves and breathtaking acrobatic lifts. Sitting so close, we could see every muscle in Damien Boudreau’s arms quiver as he held Genevieve Cliché in unbelievably difficult poses and lifts.

That wow was matched by arielists Andrew Adams and Erika Gilffether who performed equally difficult poses and holds high above the stage using ariel straps. Their music was the beautiful ballade form Sibelius’ Karelia Suite.

And there were, of course, a clown and also a rope spinning artist. But the hilight of the evening was, as always, the Flying Wallendas/Great Wallendas who did their high wire act right above our heads using bicycles no less. They did not attempt a large pyramid, but they did have two members on bikes with a chair on a pole between them holding another member of the act. Without the “use of nets or safety devices of any kind”. I held my breath the entire time.

All in all it was one of the best nights I’ve ever had at any venue and I hope they repeat this every year.

Resolved …

2011-01-04T18:56:00.002-06:00

Actually I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions, I always seem to make resolutions in September. The start of the school year. Even though I haven’t been in school for years.

But I liked this slide show. (Which does not seem to want to embed but just gives a link. Oh well.)

Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change

Happy New Year 2011!

2011-01-01T10:13:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year to all of you. 2010 is a year I’m not sorry to see go. And it went out with a bang around here, with strange weather this week that saw us go from the 30’s up to the 60’s and then get hit with a cold front – with predictable results for the Midwest: Tornados.

Predictable, except at the end of December. Oh, we’ve had tornados touch down in St. Louis before. In the spring and summer. There is a furniture store that has been hit a couple of times during my life by a tornado, it almost has become a joke with them since no one has ever been injured. But this was an out of season tornado and it hit a suburb called Sunset Hills about 10 miles from me and took out about 20 houses. Sunset Hills is about 10 miles from where I live and I’m out there all the time for shopping. Fortunately no one was killed, although other people in Missouri did die in the storms. It was a sad end to 2010.

So good riddance 2010 with your bad economy and all your crazy people populating the television and radio and your bad weather. Welcome 2011.

Please be better.

Over the Tavern

2010-12-27T17:53:00.001-06:00

I went to see the Rep’s production of Over the Tavern on December 23, last Thursday. We always end up with tickets the week of Christmas which is a little stressful in the days leading up to it but relaxing once we get there and realize that we’re just going to relax for an evening.

We’ve seen Over the Tavern before at the Rep. I remembered it as a rollicking funny story about a Catholic family who lived … over the tavern,of course. The tavern is a family affair run by the father. Supposedly the mother also tends bar but mostly she just seems to be a mom. What I remembered about the show was that the father was loud and bad tempered but he was redeemed in the end (I didn’t remember how) and I remembered that the one kid (Rudy) who gives the old nun a heart attack (literally) because he didn’t want to be confirmed was a sweet kid who just couldn’t keep himself from speaking the truth to power. With the predictable consequences.

I remember liking that production. This production I didn’t like as much. The kids were so terrified of the father in this production that it was impossible to believe that he wasn’t more physically abusive than his character was written and I found it impossible to believe in the redemption at the end because of that. I don’t think that was the fault of Kevin Cutts, who played him. I think it was the fault of the way the kid characters reacted to him. If they had blown him off a little more and taken him a little less seriously, it would have worked. I have friends who had “Loud” dads who scared me but who didn’t seem to scare my friends. They knew to ignore him most of the time. And they knew when to steer clear of him. That’s what these kids needed. They needed to be tired of his moods and wary of him but not terrified of him. These kids just seemed terrified.

And Rudy was played with no sweetness in him whatsoever. He was really kind of a dislikeable know-it-all. That was a problem.

On the other hand, Celeste Ciulla’s Ellen (the mother) and Eric Nelson’s Eddie (the older brother) were both delightful and when they were on stage the other flaws faded. And I sat up straighter every time Sister Clarissa came on stage. (But did they really need two nun-shows in a row?) The set design was also one of the best I’ve seen at the Rep.

So it wasn’t a bad production, it just wasn’t one of my favorites. I think having a terrified family as the Christmas show just didn’t work for me. I hope they go back to having a musical next year.

The last production of Over the Tavern was on December 26 so it is too late for you to catch it if you missed it.

And on Earth, Peace …

2010-12-24T15:09:00.001-06:00

A thought I endorse heartily.

To those who celebrate, have a Very Merry Christmas!

This one is almost as fun to sing as the Hallelujah Chorus:

And while I’m feeling musical (maybe it’s the snow for Christmas), back in the day when I sang Midnight Mass with the Choir my favorite moment was when we sang Adeste Fidelis (O Come All Ye Faithful). In the Catholic Church you don’t sing any Christmas Carols until it is actually Christmas. The weeks before Christmas are called Advent and they are the preparation time. Then (finally!) there are 12 days of Christmas beginning with Christmas and ending with Epiphany. There is no pressure to feel “Christmasy” until it is actually Christmas.

Secular Christmas has pretty much ruined that, what with Christmas music starting in September.

O Come All Ye Faithful for me still means Christmas is starting. This is the procession at the National Cathedral, which is Episcopal I think. But same concept. Lots of verses, lots of processors, last verse is the best:

Is it time for presents yet?

Tis the Season

2010-12-20T19:51:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the radio silence around here. The end of the year is always a little crazy for me.

In my free time I’ve been reading the Year in Reading series at The Millions in which writers talk about books they’ve read this year. I like it because they don’t have to be new books, they just have to have been read this year. So it’s a wide range.

For instance, the other day Jenny Davidson (I haven’t read any of her books) posted and said that she’d read the entire Dorothy Dunnett Niccolo series and the Lymond series (which is a lot of reading) plus a lot of other books including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This woman is not afraid of long novels! I figured if she liked Dunnett I might like some of the other books she liked. I also thought I’d check out her blog but … sigh … she likes to post word count on the book she’s working on.

I’ve been spending most of my free time Christmas shopping and wrapping (yes! Before the last minute!). But I also found time to go to the Saint Louis Art Museum to see the current exhibition of the paintings of Joe Jones. I had never heard of Joe Jones. He was a local boy who became a painter back in the 1920’s and then eventually moved to New York. During the depression he was one of the painters hired by the government to travel the country and then paint what he learned. Here’s a link to an image gallery of some of his work.

At the exhibition we got into an interesting discussion about the fact that a financial crash and a great agricultural catastrophe happened more or less simultaneously. Neither caused the other (as far as I know) but they both caused tremendous hardship.

Some of his paintings were of very difficult social subjects:

In 1933, Jones turned his artistic sympathies to the suffering of the American people and declared his belief in Communism. Little escaped his barbs as he depicted lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan, homeless farmers and other working class struggles in paintings that attacked racial bigotry as well as religious and New Deal appeasement.

If you are in the vicinity over the Christmas holidays, it runs through January 2.

The day I went to the exhibition it snowed here and Forest Park was a winter wonderland. A group of us met at The Boathouse for brunch where they had a big fire roaring. We looked over the wintry lake scene and watched the snow blow around. Then we headed up to Art Hill where the sledders were already congregating beneath the big statue of St. Louis, King of France. It wasn’t a great snow for sledding – too dry – but that didn’t stop the kids. The guards at the Art Museum had brooms for people to brush off their shoes as they came through the door and were very welcoming. Considering the weather and the fact that a few of the lower galleries are closed because of the construction going on for the new wing, there were a surprising number of people there.

I liked the snow. But then last week we got ice and that wasn’t so fun. The streets weren’t bad because they already had de-icer on them for the snow but the walk from my garage to my back door was treacherous. I few of my friends had slip and fall injuries. We’re supposed to get “weather” later this week. I hope it isn’t ice.

Folding a Fitted Sheet Could Drive You Crazy

2010-12-12T18:51:00.001-06:00

Maybe it’s just that time of year when people need a laugh, but I’ve seen a lot of funny lists going around. One of my sisters sent me one today and #5 on the list was “How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?”

Well … via Kottke I had learned the answer to that just the other day:

That should save your sanity. Which is good because you don’t want to be a crazy person. Or, maybe you do.

What none of us want is to have to deal with a crazy person.

One of the best lists I’ve seen lately was in a blog post from Judge Larry Primeaux of the 12th Chancery Court of Mississippi called “Dealing with Crazy Clients” was very practical and not necessarily limited to Crazy Clients:

1. If you don’t have to deal with a crazy person, don’t.
2. You can’t outsmart crazy. You also can’t fix crazy. (You could outcrazy it, but that makes you crazy too.)
3. When you get in a contest of wills with a crazy person, you’ve already lost.
4. The crazy person doesn’t have as much to lose as you.
5. Your desired outcome is to get away from the crazy person.
6. You have no idea what the crazy person’s desired outcome is.
7. The crazy person sees anything you have done as justification for what she’s about to do.
8. Anything nice you do for the crazy person, she will use as ammunition later.
9. The crazy person sees any outcome as vindication.
10. When you start caring what the crazy person thinks, you’re joining her in her craziness.

Good advice.

Tis the Season - to Buy Stuff

2010-11-30T21:34:00.001-06:00

During this holiday season, retailers hope that we go out and buy a lot of stuff. Stuff for gifts and stuff for ourselves. I count myself lucky to be able to buy stuff. Some aren’t so lucky.

On the other hand, most people used to live with a lot less stuff. I was thinking about this the other day as I was organizing some papers. I came across a transcript of an estate inventory from 1782.

My ancestors, Antoine Barada and his wife, Marguerite DesRosiers, were married at Post Vincennes, in what is today the state of Indiana. They moved to St. Louis with their children not long after St. Louis was founded. Antoine Barada died in 1780. Two years after his death, Marguerite re-married. I previously wrote about the marriage contract for Marguerite DesRosiers’ second marriage.

It was customary under French and Spanish law to inventory the estate prior to the re-marriage of the widow so that the children of the deceased knew what was to eventually come to them. (St. Louis was a French city living under Spanish rule at the time.)

And so, on April 30, 1782 an inventory was taken in the presence of Don Francisco Cruzat, “Grand Captain, Infantry Colonel, Commander-in-Chief of the Louisiana Territory and Governor of the Western Part of Illinois and its annexed parts”. The Widow Barada brought two witnesses who were the named executors of the estate: Baptiste Becquet and Gabriel Dodier. Becquet and Dodier were both originally from the town of Nouvelle Chartres in Southern Illinois and had come to St. Louis with the first group of settlers. They were brothers in law; each had married the sister of the other. Becquet’s daughter, Marie, had married the Widow Barada’s son, Louis, the year before.

The remaining estate of Antoine Barada was valued at 928 livres. More than half of the value was the wooden house “with no stone” located on First Street in St. Louis, described as being on a lot 120 feet in front and of “customary depth”. Inside the house was the second most valuable possession: a bed with a feather mattress. There was a pair of sheets and a down comforter for the bed. The only other furniture was two walnut dressers, one table and two chairs. For tableware there were seven tin plates, nine tin spoons, five old iron forks, one big spoon and eight “used” ceramic plates. The kitchen accoutrements included one saucepan, two earthen jars. At the fireplace were two iron andirons and two iron hooks. There were three iron cans and one millstone. Three iron bars and miscellaneous other iron pieces rounded out the estate.

And that was it. Perhaps there had been more and it had been gifted to their various children upon their weddings. But we have no records of that.

The Baradas were not particularly poor people. Oh, they weren’t rich like the Chouteaus, but they had a house and were considered upstanding citizens. But like most people of that time, they didn’t have a lot of stuff.

Short Story or Novel?

2010-11-28T20:37:00.001-06:00

This is one of those navel-gazing posts. You know, all about me. The kind in which I’m mostly just trying to figure out why I am the way I am.

Regular readers will know that I’m not much for short stories. When I sit down to read short stories I can often appreciate them but they are never my first choice to read. I instinctively shy away from them when I am looking for something to read and I automatically reach for a novel.

I was thinking about that a little more after reading Chad Harbach’s article in Slate. I was thinking about it in terms of a book I am currently reading and a book I just read. I decided months ago not to blog about books that I’m not interested in and I wasn’t intending to blog about either of these books but now they seem of more interest to me. Or at least they fit into a topic that I’m currently finding interesting. Short story v. Novel.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is a book of short stories by Maile Meloy that my reading group chose for our next book. Even though I was involved in the decision I really didn’t remember anything about the book description when I picked it up the other day and began reading. I also completely forgot it was a book of short stories. So when I started reading I was thinking … novel.

I was hooked immediately as I read about the ranch hand who, in a desperate search to escape the loneliness of the ranch, drove into town one cold winter night and followed a group of people into a building just to be near them. It turned out to be a night class on “school law” and I thought that was a a realistic but unexpected way to start. As the ranch hand returned to class the next week, the reader sees that he has a crush on/fallen in love with/become obsessed with the young woman lawyer who is teaching the night class. Ah, I thought. Great characters, good set up. The plot thickened when the young woman disappeared after a few classes because the drive was too long for her and the ranch hand searched her out. They have an awkward conversation outside her office and he leaves feeling disheartened.

The next chapter … turned out to be an entirely different story. But the fact that it was about entirely different characters in a different locale, talking about different times in their lives didn’t throw me. Lots of novels are like that these days. They jump around. I fully expected that somehow we’d get back to the ranch hand and/or the woman lawyer and explore the idea of living the lonely life.

So I felt pretty dumb when I finally figured out that these were short stories. And then very disappointed because I had set myself up for wanting to see the development of that ranch hand character, not to mention the character of the young woman lawyer. And mostly because I thought she had been developing an idea that she was going to explore in depth with these characters. Now I had to come to terms that, as far as she was concerned, this was it. She had said all she was going to say. And as far as I was concerned it wasn’t enough. I mean, if a person can’t tell that a short story is a short story as they are reading it and instead mistake it for a first chapter in a novel, don’t you think there’s a problem? I do.

And that, I thought in disgust, is why I don’t like most short stories. They seem unfinished.

But, when I calmed down and started thinking about it I realized that I do like many short stories. Flannery O’Connor’s stories. O’Henry’s stories. Stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end and you know damn good and well when you get to the end of the story. Heck, even the chapters of Olive Kitteridge had endings. Each one could have been published as a short story.

We got off to a bad start, this book and I. It isn’t that I don’t like her writing style, I do. And I’ve enjoyed some of the other stories. But with most stories I feel like there should be more. I want to tell her – go back and write a novel with the ranch hand in it. He’s got the beginnings of a good story – finish it. Don’t just tell me about him and then let the story peter out.

Sigh.

I googled her and discovered she has written two novels. Maybe I’ll give them a try. Obviously she has the capacity to draw me in. But will I trust her not to leave me hanging?

On the other hand, I recently read The Perfect Reader, a first novel by Maggie Pouncey. This was a novel that should have been a short story. It’s rare that I think that, but I did with this one. In fact, part of me wondered if it started as a short story and someone told her “there’s more to this story than you are telling” and so she tried to finish the story but just ended up with an unsatisfying novel.

In this novel the heroine, Flora Dempsey, moves back to New England when her father, former president of the local college, dies. He has made her his literary executor. Most of his work is academic but she finds he has also written some erotic poems dedicated to a fellow academic named Cynthia with whom he has been in a relationship for a while, to the surprise of Flora. Flora has to come to terms with his poems and with Cynthia.

According to Publisher’s Weekly: “This imaginative debut takes a profound look at the connection between words on the page and the infinite interpretations for a reader.” Uh, no. There was no “profound look”. At least not as far as I was concerned. Sure, she raised the issue and she had the character come to some conclusions. But she didn’t need 300 pages to do that. At least, not the way that she did it.

I had the impression that she wasn’t really interested in looking at the connection with the word on the page and the interpretation of them by readers. Because every time she got close to that, she switched topics. I think if she had really wanted to take a profound look at that issue she might have created a good novel, but instead she just kept giving us characters and plot and not ideas, and she created an average novel. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t memorable or thought provoking either.

So I’ve been thinking about what the difference is, for me, between short stories and novels. I think it is about the depth of exploration of an idea.

I don’t think I get that with a short story. At least not at the level that I want. I’m not talking about bad short stories, even I know that there are good short stories out there and sometimes I actually read one. Those are the ones I’m talking about. Of course a good short story usually does have an idea being explored. But in the small amount of time allotted, the short story really has to have a couple of well drawn characters and a story that hangs together and has to explore the idea through character and plot.

A novel, on the other hand, has more time to explore big ideas from many angles. Sure a novel can have great characters and plots but, for me, a novel isn’t really worth the time without an an idea that is being explored on multiple levels. My rating goes up in big increments if the structure of the novel helps the exploration of the idea. The novelist can create an intricate structure and multiple characters and multiple plot lines and can have them all work in service to the idea. Of course, many novels don’t. But the good ones do.

For a person like me with limited reading time, I’m always going to try to maximize the chance that I’ll get the kind of fiction I like to read. It’s annoying to be stuck reading something that is only “ok” (if it’s bad I just stop reading, but “ok” means it could get better. You only know the whole thing is average when you get to the end.).

For me, character and plot are less important than beautiful sentences, intricate structure and interesting ideas explored on a deep level. With short stories I can get characters and plot and beautiful sentences. I can even get a good idea but I can’t get it explored on a deep level and usually there isn’t an intricate structure. So that’s one reason that, given a chance, I’ll choose a novel over a short story any day. My odds are better of getting something I’ll love rather than something I’ll simply like.

Literary Culture in America

2010-11-27T13:09:00.001-06:00

There is an interesting current essay in Slate: MFA v NYC by Chad Harbach. There’s a lot to digest in the essay and, at first, I was mostly struck by how it fit in with my recent reading about the business of writing and John Scalzi’s suggestion that MFA programs teach the business of writing. After reading this essay by Harbach, I realize that the business of writing needs more definition. But the essay covers a broad array of issues and includes good discussion about the pressures that produce short stories versus the pressures that produce novels which I found very interesting.

Harbach takes as his starting point a 2009 book by Mark McGurl called The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing which, according to Harbach, seeks to shatter some myths about fiction writers who teach in MFA programs. According to Harbach, McGurl wants these writers

“to look across that hallway and notice a bunch of graduate students and professors sitting there, in identical offices, wielding identical red pens. You're like me now! is one of the cheerful subtexts of The Program Era—a literary critic's pointing-out that the creative writer is just as institutionally entangled as the critic has long been acknowledged to be. Or, more charitably put (for McGurl is perpetually charitable), that the fiction writer, at last, can cease fretting about how free and wild he is and get to work.”

Harbach, however, is more interested in looking at the kind of work that writers who work for Universities are doing and how that work compares to the work of writers who leave the academic environment, a difference he calls the MFA vs. NYC experience (since most non-academic writing is published out of NYC). And he is specifically interested in how these different paths affect the ability of a person who wants to write (and who can write) to actually be a writer or, in other words, to actually make a living from their writing.

Harbach wants critics to “venture a new, less normative distinction, based not on the writer's educational background but on the system within which she earns (or aspires to earn) her living: MFA or NYC.”

… it's safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn't surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation—of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength—is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

All of this reminded me of the recent series of blog posts by John Scalzi in which he wondered why MFA programs were not offering their students more education in the business of writing. What he meant by the business of writing was the business of writing in the NYC model. Maybe the fact that the MFA program is offering better employment opportunities to writers than the NYC path is one of the reasons it hasn’t occurred to them to offer a course in the business of writing. They would be teaching their students to negotiate against the University system. Which, in my opinion, is not a bad idea.

But Harbach is not particularly interested in the contents of an MFA program. He is primarily interested in how these two systems of making a living have created two literary cultures. It’s all very interesting and I encourage you to read it. Here’s his main thesis:

Each culture has its own canonical works and heroic figures; each has its own logic of social and professional advancement. Each affords its members certain aesthetic and personal freedoms while restricting others; each exerts its own subtle but powerful pressures on the work being produced.

Of course some writers can slip back and forth between the two cultures.

He also points out something that is probably obvious to people who are involved in the writing industry but that was new to me: one culture is a culture of short stories (MFA) and one is a culture of novels (NYC). I had never really thought about this before.

It occurred to me that maybe this is why I have an antipathy to the concept of MFA programs – because I don’t like short stories all that much. I’ve always justified my dislike of the idea of MFA programs because they seem to prey on people’s hopes and dreams, taking their money without giving them anything much in return. I had a vague feeling that MFA programs produce a lot of literature that no one wants to read. Nobody needs to pay $40-80 thousand dollars to create literature that no one wants to read, you can do that for free in your own house.

Harbach says it much better than I ever could:

Thus the names that reverberate through the MFA system, from the freshman creative writing course up through the tenured faculty, tend to be those of story writers. At first glance, this may seem like a kind of collective suicide, because everyone knows that no one reads short stories. And it's true that the story, once such a reliable source of income for writers, has fallen out of mass favor, perhaps for reasons opposite to that of the poem: If in the public imagination poetry reeks suspiciously of high academia—the dry, impacted arcana of specialists addressing specialists—then the short story may have become subtly and pejoratively associated with low academia—the workaday drudgery of classroom exercises and assignments. The poet sublimates into the thin air of the overeducated Ph.D.; the story writer melts down into the slush of the composition department. Neither hits the cultural mark. A writer's early short stories (as any New York editor will tell you) lead to a novel, or they lead nowhere at all.

What he doesn’t say, but what I always think, is that people who hand over $40,000 for the privilege of being unread are … well, a little bit stupid. I always think that and then I feel guilty. After all, if the MFA program is preying on these people’s hopes and dreams then THEY are the victims. But it isn’t necessary to feel sorry for the victim in order to judge the victimizer guilty.

Harbach sees it another way and I’m glad to be able to consider this other point of view. He writes:

The [MFA student ]lives in a college town, and when she turns her gaze forward and outward, toward the future and the literary world at large, she sees not, primarily, the New York cluster of editors and agents and publishers but, rather, a matrix of hundreds of colleges with MFA programs, potential employers all, linked together by Poets & Writers, AWP, and summertime workshops at picturesque make-out camps like Sewanee and Bread Loaf. More links, more connections, are provided by the attractive, unread, university-funded literary quarterlies that are swapped between these places and by the endowments and discretionary funds that deliver an established writer-teacher from her home program to a different one, for a well-paid night or week, with everybody's drinks expensed: This system of circulating patronage may have some pedagogical value but exists chiefly to supplement the income of the writer-teacher and, perhaps more important, to impress on the students the more glamorous side of becoming—of aspiring to become—a writer-teacher.

For the MFA writer, then, publishing a book becomes not a primary way to earn money or even a direct attempt to make money. The book instead serves as a credential.

This piece was also food for thought on my earlier question about why would-be writers don’t seem to read more. Well, maybe they are reading things that I’m not reading, especially if they are in MFA programs. It turns out that only the public doesn’t read short stories. In college everyone reads short stories (a fact that I remember from college) and so the market for all of these MFA short stories isn’t me, it is the MFA programs:

To learn how to write short stories, you also have to read them. MFA professors—many of them story writers themselves—recommend story collections to their students. MFA students recommend other collections to one another; they also, significantly, teach undergraduate creative writing courses, which are built almost exclusively around short works. In classes that need to divide their attention between the skill of reading and the craft of writing (and whose popularity rests partly on their lack of rigor), there's no time for ploughing through novels.

This, he says, means that the canon for MFA writers tend to be short stories. That means that, more likely than not, I won’t have read them.

The entire essay is well worth reading and I hope to read the thoughts and responses of other people to this essay. In some ways it is a hopeful essay but in other ways it is depressing. He is equally interesting writing about the problems on the NYC path to writing. He admits it is skewed to the white, male writer and that the MFA programs have opened up many more opportunities for women writers. He acknowledges the pressures from the publishing industry on the form of the novel:

In short, the writer who hopes to make a living by publishing—whether wildly successful like Franzen, more moderately so, or just starting out—is subject to a host of subtle market pressures, pressures that might be neutral in their aesthetic effects, but which enforce a certain consistency, and a sort of Authorial Social Responsibility. Regardless of whether reading comprehension and attention spans have declined, the publishers think that they have, and the market shapes itself accordingly. The presumed necessity of "competing for attention" with other media becomes internalized, and the work comes out crystal-clear. The point is not that good books go unpublished—to the contrary, scores of crappy literary novels continue to get snapped up by hopeful editors. The point is that market forces cause some good books to go unnoticed, and even more—how many more?—to go unwritten.

He also acknowledges that the short attention span in the publishing world means that those who write in the MFA universe, whose stories are anthologized and taught and studied may, in fact, enjoy longevity.

But, as he somewhat depressingly concludes, this may mean that writers will, more than ever, write for other writers. As a reader, and especially as a reader who has little interest in short stories, I find this particularly depressing.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T10:03:00.001-06:00

Today my job is to bring the Cranberry Relish.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who are celebrating.

A Silver Bullet for Making Math Education Work

2010-11-21T20:43:00.001-06:00

As presented by the guy from Wolfram and Hart, who should know a thing about avoiding silver bullets:

Oh wait. He’s not from Wolfram and Hart, he’s from Wolfram Research.

Never mind.